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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

Each of the three could receive about 12.3 million Microsoft shares, assuming they control equal stakes in GitHub. A 0.16 percent holding would give each of them about 10 times more shares than Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella, and roughly 14 times more than President Brad Smith. Among insiders, only co-founder Bill Gates’s 1.34 percent holding would exceed theirs, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Imagine an Apple buys NeXTSTEP styled coup by acquisition.

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Apple only bought Jobs and some ideas. NeXTSTEP was worthless. Yeah, it turned into OSX, but they could have started with Linux or BSD just as easily. This analogy only holds if the GitHub founders stick around, and they've already announced a new CEO.

Considering the value Apple has extracted from NeXTSTEP, they certainly underpaid for it.

I’m not sure I’d call anything that turned into iOS “worthless”.

I think they are saying there was so much work involved in getting it to that stage, they could have built on any OS and not spent any more time doing it.

You mean a huge company could have released 1000 PM's and hundreds of millions of dollars, 99% of which would be spent on political infighting and empire building ... Wait weren't we trying to build a product ? NO ! I NEED MORE HEADCOUNT NOW !

Buying can be far more effective than building, especially for large companies.

No NextSTEP was very valuable! At least in terms of a GUI and user interface development platform. According to most lore of that era which I’ve read it was as an amazing developer platform [0].

There’s reason both Tim Berners-Lee’s little side project (the “WorldWideWeb") was developed on NextSTEP bought specifically for the project [1]. Or why Doom was written on Next machines as well [2]. The semi-dynamic features of Obj-C made a very power UI development system and the postscript backed graphics system was (likely) the first and only vector based display subsystem. Linux / BSDs and OS GUI frameworks still suck at handling hi-dpi in 2018. Well QT’s ok at it.

Linux and PC BSDs were more primitive at the time Next was aquired, especially the UI subsystem and X11.

So NextSTEP brought a powerful ahead-of-its-time graphics subsystem, solid BSD Unix based OS tools and services, and powerful dynamic development system and language. If that’s not valuable well by your estimation, it’s worked pretty well for the most valuable company in the US.

0: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-deep-history-of-you... 1: https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TimBook-old/History.html 2: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/01/why-john-carma...

Unlikely given the founders' projected involvement, but this would be seriously awesome.

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