He sold the company to them in 2005. If he didn't think that was a fair price he wouldn't have agreed to the sale. That was when he was compensated for his creation. After that, he was compensated through salary.

I don't understand your point of view here. If I sell something to someone else, I'm not expecting to get more payout for it fifteen years down the line unless some kind of residual was explicitly negotiated in the original sale agreement. Acquisitions would never happen at all if the acquiring company was on the hook for unbounded amounts of money decades later just because they made it successful. This point of view seems very un-businesslike. Andy Rubin was not owed that $90M, it shouldn't have been paid to him, and Google has admitted to its mistake and will not be paying out in similar cases going forward.

1. It was an aquihire. Usually there's some performance secondary payout strings attached.

2. It doesn't matter what their deal was. It matters what public perception is. I'm talking entirely about public perception.

Regardless of what their deal was, Google has to send a signal that _impacts future deals_. If the general developer public thinks that Android was acquired for too little, then we will all be reluctant to sell our projects to Google. That's the whole point.

It has nothing to do with him thinking Google treated him fairly. It has to do with whether we think we could keep a company going long enough to make more money than his payout on _our_ work.

Google needs to make more Android-like deals in the future.

And all of that needs to be weighed against the huge worldwide negative PR resulting from the payout, the global walkout of tens of thousands of employees expressing their anger with the decision, and the depressive effect on hiring that has for specific targeted groups. You can't just analyze the payout in isolation; you have to analyze its sum total effects. Turns out, the payment wasn't worth it. Google has said as much and won't be doing it again in the future.

> If the general developer public thinks that Android was acquired for too little, then we will all be reluctant to sell our projects to Google. That's the whole point.

I'm still not understanding the point here. If you agree to sell your company for price $X, it doesn't matter who you're selling to; you've sold for that amount. If you think you should get more than $X, then don't sell to Google, or anyone else for that matter, for only $X. If you want less up front but more money over time as part of an incentive structure, then negotiate for that as part of the acquisition (which Andy Rubin did do and was paid out for). All of this is independent from a severance payout fully 15 years after the acquisition.

> Google needs to make more Android-like deals in the future.

I think you'd be hardpressed to find a founder that wouldn't sell to Google for what they consider the right price if he didn't get $90M. Do you think any football players don't want to play for the Patriots, because Aaron Hernandez wasn't supported by them? People get that all bets are off with criminally poor behavior.

That's an extreme comparison given that Andy Rubin was never tried in a court of law for any crimes and Hernandez was convicted of murder