Microsoft paid half a billion dollars to buy Andy Rubin's company, Danger. They decided to rewrite the platform from Java to Dot Net, which took so long the product was no longer competitive when they finished. Then they spent a fortune to advertise a product that was canceled after two weeks.
Then Microsoft decided to take another huge pile of cash and set that on fire by purchasing Nokia's mobile phone business.
> Microsoft wasted at least $8 billion on its failed Nokia experiment
Well to compare Apples to Apples we would need to know how much money Apple has spent with many of those efforts, which before Jobs came back almost driven the company to bankruptcy.
For younger generations Apple might feel unstoppable, meanwhile I remember the discussions to migrate away from surviving Macs on our IT department, and my graduation thesis was porting a particle simulation engine from NeXTSTEP into Windows, as those boxes were to be sent away.
We don't have to wonder with Microsoft. Again and again they have paid billions of dollars for complete failures like the Surface RT and Windows RT. They would have been well advised to cancel the platform before spending a fortune on advertising and unsold inventory.
Hell, how much did they pay for Skype, despite already having several text and video chat clients of their own? Then they completely rewrote Skype before replacing it with Teams.
They have a longstanding habit of taking shareholder value and creating huge bonfires from it.
These were arguably pretty reasonable hedging; it was _far from certain_ that developers would accept Objective C, and then later there was a general sense that dynamic interpreted languages might eat the world. I can't imagine either were particularly expensive; MacRuby in particular was basically someone's side project?
> WebObjects
This was inherited, and was pretty successful in its day (though it did perhaps outstay its welcome).
Most of the others you name are either _very_ old, or were actually quite useful in their day but have aged out.
Quicktime was never cancelled. It was adopted industry wide as the MP4 file format.
> MPEG-4 Part 14 is an instance of the more general ISO/IEC 14496-12:2004 (MPEG-4 Part 12: ISO base media file format) which is directly based upon the QuickTime File Format which was published in 2001.
Titan is another recent big bet that went nowhere, but so happened to be too big to hide. Who knows gow many other secret dead-end projects they buried.
It was never announced so not comparable to other's dropping projects once they're in the open, and if all we're relying on are rumours and industry analysts, then those still say they're continuing the work on Titan, with a view towards a 2025-2028 launch.
But it does change what makes sense to talk about in terms of "Apple" as it exists today.
Otherwise you might as well talk about why IBM is an undefeatable behemoth that dominates the industry...oh, wait, what's that? That hasn't been true for over 30 years now? I thought age didn't change facts?
You mean the company that is usually the champion on patents per year, owns a large portion of Linux, GNOME and GCC development, is the 2nd major Java vendor, and has had quite a good fiscal year, including growth in mainframe and micro sales?
A behemoth indeed, only HN isn't paying attention where it matters.
QuickTime wasn’t a failure. It was the basis of their entire media playback API for over two decades. WebObjects came in with the acquisition of NeXT and from what I gather is still the basis of the backend of iTunes and the App Store. Most of the rest were pre 1997.
We don't know more due to the secrecy.
EDIT: A few more I just remembered, MacRuby, OpenCL, WebObjects, Quicktime