The case wasn't the look & feel lawsuit, that was ruled on ages before the public investment press event.

It was about the Quicktime for Windows lawsuit, wherein Microsoft & Intel hired the Quicktime for Windows developer, then ordered the developer to copy Quicktime for Windows source code and put it into Video for Windows.

And you're right to be skeptical about the 4 billion figure, since Apple had over 8 billion in cash and short term investments a couple years before the investment. That number was on a steady downward trend however, but there's no way it got slashed in half by the time of the lawsuit.

The real smoking gun of the Apple/Microsoft settlement is the cross licensing agreement, wherein Apple got access to a huge array of Microsoft source code, and Apple didn't end up owning Microsoft because they were finally legally authorized to have the Quicktime code inside Windows (Microsoft had since gone on to use DCI for other things, derive other technologies using the techniques, etc.).

As for there not being software patents at the time, holy crap you must be young. Do you think we rode around on dinosaurs?

Apple paid a developer to create Quicktime for Windows for them. Their latest version used an innovative method to copy video to the screen that was light-years faster than what Microsoft was doing with Video for Windows at the time. Since Apple paid the developer, the code in question did not belong to the developer, it belonged to Apple. If I hire you to produce shovels for me, you don't get to come along later and grab a shovel out of my inventory because you made it. The fruit of your labor is owned by the person who paid you to do the labor. That's why you're getting paid.

As part of the lawsuit, interviews with the individuals in question were performed as well as legal discovery of documents, emails, etc. End of the day Intel and Microsoft met with the developer and told them in no uncertain terms to copy the code from Quicktime to put in DCI, and proof of it came out during discovery. Both Intel and Microsoft quietly settled the lawsuit in Apple's favor. How do you know this? Because a very short time after the lawsuit was settled Microsoft made their public endorsement, bought Apple stock, formed a Macintosh Business Unit, and (this is key) cross-licensed source code.

Microsoft re-distributed it because the individuals responsible for the act thought nobody would ever find out, because they kept the knowledge of the act compartmentalized. The rest of Microsoft didn't realize what the managerial team responsible for producing DCI did, they just realized they needed to compete and these guys pulled off a hail mary play that would help them nail those &*(@#&*($# bastards over at Apple to a wall.

As for what was so great about the technology, it literally quadrupled (or more) the framerate of videos displayed on screen while simultaneously requiring less CPU time. Apple paid their Windows developer handsomely to develop this technology and expressly forbid them from sharing this work with other companies.

PowerPC is also still around, you need look no further than a Playstation 3 or XBox 360 to find a mass-market example of one. And they're still huge in the embedded market.

So packaging, manuals, distribution, development, advertising, warehousing, and all the other work that went into software in the 80s & 90s cost "near zero?"

My god man, custom runs of floppy disks alone were $1 or more, and most products included multiple floppies. When CDs first came out there were substantial mastering costs involved in pressed discs, and the per-disc price was also measured in dollars, not cents.

You really need to realize that Steam wasn't available in 1986.

No it isn't, but Vista, the preceding product, was. It was such a low quality product that Microsoft was forced to roll up their sleeves and fix all the problems in it, then had the gall to charge us all for it.

When they did the same thing in Windows 98 Second Edition, at least they released a megapatch that updated long-suffering Windows 98 owners to Windows 98 SE. Similarly, when Apple released OS X 10.1 they gave it away free to everyone who owned OS X 10.0.

Seriously, what the hell.

If by gun you mean requiring them to pay him money for a Windows license even if they didn't ship a copy of Windows with the system or, if they didn't want to agree to those terms, pay a substantially inflated price for Windows licenses that would have made their business uncompetitive... then yes he did.

Indeed, the investment didn't matter at all. The public support was what was important.

Of course the actual reason for the support was due to Microsoft (and Intel) being on the losing end of the QuickTime for Windows lawsuit. When you hire your competitor's third party developer to develop the next generation of your competing product, then explicitly tell them that the developer needs to copy the source code from your competitor and put it in your next gen product, you damn well better believe you'll be on the losing end of a lawsuit. Once the evidence of that was uncovered a settlement in Apple's favor was inevitable.

So when you go out and build a better mousetrap, patent it so you can get a reasonable return for your vast amounts of research, design, & engineering on the mousetrap, it's okay for Samsung to rush a competing product to the market that rips off all the work you put into designing a better product, cut into your sales, and financially threaten your ability to produce future improvements?

We, as in human beings, can only create better products by being able to profit off the product of our labor. If you allow competitors to wander in after-the-fact and release a design for less (which they can do because their investment was less, copying a design costs less than creating something new), there's no incentive to design a better product, and the end result is stagnation.

You aren't just allowed to use information that was provided during trial, legal terms can be thrown around in court yet never get explained to the jury. The juror should have asked the judge for clarification about the topic, at which point the judge would have provided background material that was legally sound or at least neutral. Any reference material that wasn't cleared by the judge would have been equally bad, it's not just Wikipedia being singled out.

In theory this is the kind of thing (ignorance of key parts of the trial) that jury selection is supposed to cover, but these days they waste time trying to gerrymander a win based on statistics and don't actually bother to ask jurors useful questions - like whether they know what sexual assault when the individual has been charged with sexual assault.

Not to detract from your comment (or how wrong the comment you responded to was), but if every watt used came out as heat, then the computer would not function. In other words if all the electricity going into the CPU was being converted to heat, then nothing would be left over for the CPU to process data.

The heat being released by the CPU is a byproduct of certain inefficiencies in silicon chip design, which can be reduced by some technologies but can't be eliminated. In fact the heat being released by other system components are caused by inefficiencies in their designs - nothing is 100% efficient, and this inefficiency is released as heat.