Exception to this rule was NeXT purchasing Apple for negative $400 million.

Most of the NeXT senior staff (jabs, avi, etc) Went on to take over roles at Apple. They also brought in all the NeXT technology and threw out Apples' Nextstep/Openstep->Mac OSX

They were acquired by their old boss so less of a culture clash and no need for turf wars between opposing sides.

Steve Jobs had been gone for 12 years, there was plenty of culture clash and turf wars. Steve just managed to prevail.

When he returned, the workforce was pampered and attached to projects that weren't going anywhere. Steve removed a number of perks, and killed some of the biggest, most internally popular projects (Newton and OpenDoc come to mind). Lot's of people left.

But Steve came back to Apple as a savvy politician. He managed to get the board of directors in his back pocket, and sell his vision of Apple to the employees. Those that stayed, stayed because they came to believe in his vision, not because he placated them.

I will say this though, I think there's a truth underneath your statement. Apple attracted people who wanted to change the world. The culture may have been different, but there was still a core motivation in Apple employees that came from Steve's original vision of computing.

Minor correction: I wouldn’t call Newton an “internally popular product”. At least, working on Newton I didn’t feel that way. And just before SJ came back, Apple had spun Newton out into a separate company because it wasn’t really fitting in. SJ spun it back in and killed it.

Would love to learn more about Newton - history and/or tech. Any resources on the web or anything interesting you may want to share?

Check the Dylan thread, which was supposed to be the systems language for Newton OS,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15106802

Or just reach out for the Newton documentation, scattered about some sites,

https://newtonfaq.com/

http://newtonscript.org/

https://www.newted.org/manuals/

great hn thread, thanks.

Thanks for the correction - I’d entirely forgotten that Newton got spun off!

Anyone have any insight on why Red Hat sold their soul?

They were a publicly traded company and IBM offered something like $190 a share when they were trading around $120.

The decision was in the hands of a board whose sole legal goal, these days, is securing maximal financial return for shareholders (and the shareholders agreed -- there was an explicit vote). A soul is a luxury that companies don't usually get to keep past IPO.

Sole? No. No matter how many times people repeat it. Or, at least, companies can and do spend money on things that can be argued to be in service of the long-term profit and image of the company. Otherwise, how could a company do charitable giving?

That said, if someone makes an offer for a public company, the board does pretty much need to put it to a shareholder vote although they can negotiate for a higher price and ultimately make a recommendation. But it's up to the shareholders. They're the ones that own the company.

This is why I'm in favor of founder controlled shares (Founder's Fund companies tend to do this - Zuckerberg at FB).

Founder's retain total voting control of the company and can do what they think is in the best interest of the company.

The board can complain and vote against it in favor of stupid short-term decisions that harm in the company, but in the end Zuck can tell them to fuck off and buy instagram because he thinks it's the right thing to do.

While I don't completely disagree, a Benevolent (or not) Dictator For Life can have it's own set of problems. And I'd not that it's generally not considered a great governance model for large open source projects--though that's obviously a somewhat different situation.

I agree founder led companies are more like dictatorships (though feudal earldoms may be a better analogy?), this becomes less true in older companies no longer lead by a founder. I agree there’s risk (founder could lose touch or go crazy), but I think that risk is less likely than bad board decisions by non-founders. It’s also bounded a bit by the ability to retain high quality talent.

I also agree that for collaborative open source projects a different approach is often preferable (as well as governments too obviously).

> And I'd [note?] that it's generally not considered a great governance model for large open source projects

Citation needed? Offhand, it's worked great for linux, and while perl and python have had some infamous problems, they don't seem particularly specific to the BDFL model, and they seemed to work well before that.

"long-term profit" is the long-term financial returns to shareholders -- and corporate philanthropy is generally held to be justified in B-school circles only in so far as it builds up marketable goodwill (again, adding shareholder value), not for its own sake.

This is why some companies and interests are better off staying private. SpaceX is a perfect example. Musk doesn't want to be accountable to shareholders for return on investment and annual results.

At that point though, just about any reasonable actions can be justified even if they're not in the interests of immediate quarter earnings per share. And that's not what most people arguing that the board is legally required to maximize profits are talking about.

"Otherwise, how could a company do charitable giving?"

Because it's a tax write-off and makes for good press?

I expect IBM will be an Irish or similar company soon.

What's an Irish company, in this context?

I believe they're referring to this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland_as_a_tax_haven

It already is ;)

Same as google..

https://www.google.com/maps/search/google,+dublin/@53.340165...