NeXT
Silly rumor of the day: Apple to buy Twitter for $10B
April 23, 2012: 4:09 PM ETNot going to happen. Not Apple. Not at that price. No matter what Forbes says.
Image: weeble.net
FORTUNE -- At 11:07 a.m. Monday, a brief item hit the business newswires:
Apple may buy Twitter for $10B -- Forbes
At first I assumed it was some kind of mistake. But no, there it was on Forbes.com: A 980-word piece by Eric Jackson, one of their regular contributors, pitching Apple's (AAPL) $10 billion purchase of Twitter as the "next shoe to drop" after Facebook's $1 billion acquisition of Instagram.
This is how rumors get started.
It wasn't that long ago that Apple was supposed to be buying Facebook. Or Disney. Or Yahoo. Or Adobe. Or Tivo. Or Netflix. Or Electronic Arts.
That list, published in the New York Times, followed an offhand comment by Steve Jobs about Apple keeping its cash "powder dry" for one or more "strategic opportunities." See here.
The rumors didn't make sense then and they don't now. Facebook and Twitter are not the kind of company Apple buys.
What kind of enterprise does Apple buy? The list below, taken from Wikipedia, is instructive. As the entry succinctly puts it, paraphrasing BusinessWeek's Arik Hesseldahl (now at AllThingsD): "Apple's business philosophy is to acquire small companies that can be easily integrated into existing company projects."
For example:
- 1997 Next (programming services). Value: $404 million
- 1997 Power Computing (cloned computers). $100 million
- 1999 Xemplar Education (software). $5 million
- 1999 Raycer Graphics (graphic chips). $15 million
- 2000 NetSelector (Internet software). Value: NA
- 2001 Astarte (DVD authoring software). Value: NA
- 2001 bluebuzz (Internet service provider). Value: NA
- 2001 Source Technologies (graphics software). Value: NA
- 2001 PowerSchool (online info systems services). $62 million
- 2002 Nothing Real (special effects software). $15 million
- 2002 Zayante (software). $13 million
- 2002 Silicon Grail Corp-Chalice (digital effects software). Value: NA
- 2002 Emagic (music production software). $30 million
- 2002 Propel Software (software). Value: NA
- 2005 Fingerworks (gesture recognition). Value: NA
- 2006 Silicon Color (software). Value: NA
- 2006 Proximity (software). Value: NA
- 2008 P.A. Semi (semiconductors). $268 million
- 2009 Placebase (maps). Value: NA
- 2009 Lala (music streaming). $17 million
- 2010 Quattro (mobile advertising). $275 million
- 2010 Intrinsity (semiconductors). $121 million
- 2010 Siri (voice-recognition software). $200 million
- 2010 Poly9 (Web-based mapping). Value: NA
- 2010 Polar Rose (face recognition). $29 million
- 2010 IMSense (photography). Value: NA
- 2011 C3 Technologies (3D Mapping). $267 million
- 2011 Anobit (Flash memory management). $390 million
- 2012 Chomp (App search). $50 million
See? Not a Facebook or Yahoo among them. Apple's largest acquisition was the 1997 purchase of NeXT that brought Steve Jobs back to the company for $404 million -- about 1/25th the price Jackson is suggesting Apple pay for Twitter.
So file this story with the one Forbes ran last week on the significance of Tim Cook's visit to gaming powerhouse Valve -- a visit, we later learned, that never took place.
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In 1991, while Steve Jobs was at NeXT and before he returned to Apple (AAPL), the first President Bush considered him for an appointment on the White House's Export Council, triggering an FBI background check. [Update: The Commerce Department confirmed that Jobs did in fact serve on Bush's Export Council.]
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Stephen Wolfram: It was Steve Jobs who named 'Mathematica'
The creator of the answer engine in Siri writes about his long relationship with Jobs
There are a several novel anecdotes about Apple's (AAPL) late CEO in the piece British scientist Stephen Wolfram wrote for Saturday's The Guardian.
While at NeXT, Jobs took great interest in Wolfram's breakthrough algebra-solving computer program and even came up with a name for it: Mathematica
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Dec 10, 2011 9:45 PM ET
When Wolfram asked Jobs to blurb A New Kind of Science, Wolfram's 2002 book MOREPosted in: A New Kind of Science, Apple, iPhone, Laurene Powell, Mathematica, New Kind of Science, NeXT, Siri, Stephen Wolfram, Steve Jobs, Wolfram Alpha -
Steve Jobs and Me: A journalist reminisces
Fortune contributor Brent Schlender shares some of the stories and personal photographs he collected during more than two decades as Steve Jobs' chronicler and confidant.
FORTUNE -- Most of us who wrote in depth about the brilliant career of Steve Jobs sooner or later came to realize that we were complicit in the making of a modern myth. You simply couldn't avoid it. And while it is true that Jobs was MORE
Oct 25, 2011 5:00 AM ET -
'You know, I've got a plan that could rescue Apple'
Fortune's Kindle book is a treasure trove of vintage Steve Jobs vignettes
"Contempt" is probably the word that best describes Steve Jobs' attitude toward the press. But he courts the publications he cares about, and over the years one of the magazines he courted most assiduously -- at least until a certain 2008 cover story -- was Fortune.
While at Apple (AAPL), NeXT, Pixar and Apple again, he gave Fortune's writers and editors MORE
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Video: Steve Jobs lays out his vision for iCloud -- in 1997
"Let me describe the world I live in"
Steve Jobs got a lot off his chest in his Q&A session with developers at WWDC 1997 -- the first after he returned to Apple (AAPL) from his years in the desert at NeXT.
We've dipped once before into the 70-minute video (available here) to highlight his remarks about Wall Street and the press. (See The stock will take care of itself.)
But there's lots MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Sep 24, 2011 5:41 AM ETPosted in: Apple, cloud computing, Gigabit Ethernet, hard drives, iCloud, Internet, networking, NeXT, PCs, servers, Steve Jobs, Tablets -
A portrait of Steve Jobs at 31
"There is a bounce to his step that betrays a certain youthful cockiness"
Joe Nocera's lovely op-ed essay in Saturday's New York Times does us all a favor by including a link to a piece Nocera wrote about Steve Jobs for Esquire in 1986.
Jobs had been kicked out of Apple (AAPL), and to help drum up publicity for his new project, NeXT, he invited Nocera -- who would later become Fortune's editorial director MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Aug 27, 2011 9:24 AM ET -
Exit Apple senior VP Bertrand Serlet
One of the architects of Mac OS X -- and a top Steve Jobs lieutenant -- is out
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Spending more time with science, rather than one's family, is not the usual reason given for MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Mar 23, 2011 11:01 AM ET -
Is Apple helping kill the Web?
For its 20th anniversary, the man who invented the World Wide Web sounds a warning
Totalitarian governments. Cable monopolies. Magazine smartphone apps. The walled gardens of giant social networking sites. And Apple's (AAPL) iTunes music store.
These are some of the things Tim Berners-Lee, who launched the World Wide Web in December 1990 -- on one of Steve Jobs' NeXT computers, we might add -- cites as threats to its survival.
The Web, MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Nov 19, 2010 11:18 AM ET
