[Also note that Macs have now officially become the computers of the 3% ;-> ]
Jobs sold Apple stock before Microsoft pact
NEW YORK - Fearing Apple Computer would never recover its past polish,
co-founder Steve Jobs sold $22 million of Apple stock two months before
announcing a pact with Microsoft that boosted its value, Jobs told Time
magazine.
In June Jobs sold off the 1.5 million shares he received as part of the
$424 million Apple paid him in December for NeXT Software. He sold the
stock at about $15 a share for more than $22 million - about $16 million
less than the shares would be worth now.
"Yes, I pretty much had given up hope that the Apple board was going to do
anything," Jobs said in the magazine's Aug. 18 issue. "I didn't think the
stock was going up."
Jobs, recently named a board member of the Cupertino, Calif.-based computer
maker he co-founded, now holds a single share of Apple stock as a symbolic
gesture.
"If that upsets employees, I'm perfectly happy to go home to Pixar," he
told the magazine, referring to his animation company.
Microsoft jolted the computer world Wednesday by agreeing to cooperate in a
deal that gives Microsoft a stake in Apple's survival.
The pact was signed early Wednesday morning after a year of secretive
on-and-off talks. Microsoft said it would invest $150 million in Apple --
worth about 7% of the struggling computer maker. It also is paying Apple an
undisclosed sum that could add up to hundreds of millions more to resolve
bickering over each other's patents.
With Microsoft agreeing to continue writing Macintosh programs, Apple is
hoping that other software makers will keep creating new Macintosh products.
Moreover, the former opponents are now freer to integrate the best aspects
of each other's software, raising the possibility that distinctions between
Mac and Windows computers will blur.
Jobs has been the object of on-and-off speculation that he would be Apple's
next chairman, but he has said the company had not yet decided who would
lead it. Jobs was named a board member along with Larry Ellison, the
founder and chief executive of Oracle, the world's second-largest
independent software company after Microsoft.
For years, the Macintosh operating system's popularity was based on its
ease of use compared with the hard-to-remember commands that Microsoft's
DOS required. But with the launch of Windows 95 two years ago, Microsoft
matched and in some cases surpassed those advantages.
Macs accounted for 2.9% of all personal computers sold through retail
stores in the first quarter, down from 10.2% a year ago, according to
Computer Intelligence, a La Jolla, Calif.-based market research firm.
By The Associated Press
--- Rohit Khare /// MCI Internet Architecture (BOS) /// khare@mci.net Voice+Pager: (617) 960-5131 VNet: 370-5131 Fax: (617) 960-1009