Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 16, 2023

The employees should have known it was coming.

Because Gary needed to keep a narrative going, so Mike couldn’t have that much success.

A reverse plot armour

Won’t Alex come up with a solution??

Because monopolies are a good thing, it keeps competition alive.

But Mike stuck to his guns ….

Why did Microsoft even make the offer if they had a competing product ready to go? Isn’t the whole point of making the offer to save on development time and acquire the talent? Doesn’t seem like they needed either.

We were meeting with some benefits reps back when we started up our company, a consulting company based on our personal expertise in our field. These guys proudly laid out an elaborate (and expensive) plan to protect our wealth “when we get bought out” by a big firm. I asked “but what would they be buying out? We don’t make anything.” He said, “well they’d buy your assets!” I quipped back, “I think that’s been frowned upon since the 1860s.”

You could have been a Ray Kurzweil, starting successful enterprises, selling them for big money, then starting another with a completely different product. But NOOOO …

Good.Now Mike can put his car back in the garage where it belongs. Heck,he’s used everything but tear gas to get these loafers out of his garage.

Not everyone was meant to be a manager.

Just like Yahoo could have bought Google for $1M and Blockbuster could have bought Netflix for cheap, CEO’s ego’s just keep getting in the way.

Shouldn’t they be xeroxing their resumes and sending them out with company postage?

Microsoft had been generous to Mike.

Alex is so scared that her eyes have reverted to their childlike aspect?

Make a deal with the devil, you get burned.

Refuse a deal with the devil, you get crucified.

I worked for more than one software outfit that went belly up, and it was only slightly prettier than that. (But alas for employees in such a situation now — the network is probably all wireless. No CAT-5 cable to be found.)

All of them were expecting that buy out to retire early. Now they have to find another start up and do it all over again.