No, this is not a blog post on the endless battle between end user and developers as a result of them not understanding each other. No, this post is about "what determines the value of a software/service company". Is it the number of end users or the developers/service people?

Lets start off with a made up example: What would MySQL AB be worth if, lets say Microsoft and not Sun would have bought it? Microsoft would have gotten a ton of users this way. Maybe it would have been worth the price just for an opportunity to try and kill a competitor (this would of course only partially work due to MySQL's GPL nature). How many developers would quit their jobs? How would that affect the future of the product? Ultimately I would expect the chances for a MySQL product and related services to go down considerably because key developers leaving would diminish end user trust and they would spearhead the creation of alternatives.

Now what about another example. Like Microsoft buying Yahoo. How many of the current crop of fairly opensourcy Yahoo engineers would stay with Microsoft? As you all know this is a very real example, since there is currently such an offer on the table. What astonishes me is that most discussions about if this deal makes sense talks about the current value of Yahoo, the synergies with Microsoft, the potential for growth and what not. But very few people are talking about what would happen to the brain pool Yahoo currently employs. What would happen if maybe a significant chunk of that brain pool would leave for the competition or create new companies?

People are still so stuck in old thinking that a company's value is determined by things they can just shuffle around. In the past companies would get valued according to its hard assets (factories, inventory etc.). Today's IT companies seem to be solely valued on the number of users they have. I know that Friendster never was what Yahoo is today, but it should serve as a good reminder (anyone still remember them?) how fast users can disappear if you run into technical difficulties. Firing developers that help you solve your problems is also not a good idea. I just wish people would not be so brain dead, but I guess the people loosing money on the stock market are the private small time brokers, while the big wigs always manage to make a buck.

Sure, developes would leave, but microsoft has a large enough pool of developers, so for them it would not be a problem. I'm not even sure that more developers would love to work for yahoo than microsoft. Sure, the good ones would choose yahoo :) but the hordes of developers that come out of microsoft and java-oriented computer science educations are much larger.

Objectively looking at it from the outside, developers are also 'things to move around' to use the term you used.

Well every company, especially large ones, carry some "baggage" of employs that do little but get payed the same as the other guys. Those guys will stick around, a lot of the guys that get the job done will probably leave. Not sure if Microsoft has the PHP expertise to replace them and rushed migrations got Microsoft burned enough with Hotmail, so that I hope they have learned the lesson. So no, I do not think that top developers can be "shuffled around" and this means that any one buying up a company needs to factor this into the equation.

So... would you predict that a large number of MySQL developers are now currently looking for other employment? Surely there must be some clash between working from a majority remote worker swedish company to a large office american company, but I have seen very little talk of that. Maybe it isn't as large a factor as you think? Or is it possible that it is more important that as long as Sun has control of the end user / open source development community which is tied so strongly to the MySQL product, they can still keep the juggernaught moving forward?

Well I think most MySQL AB employees will give Sun the benefit of the doubt. But I am sure some people will take this opportunity to say "I do not really feel like waiting and seeing". However, we will see how the realities of having a much stricter legal department will play out and how that might lead to people leaving. And again, those people annoyed would likely be top developers who want to write code.