Hacker News Reader

Comment by lazaroclapp | Hacker News Reader

The more interesting part here, is that Zuckerberg being 31 years old, and having a life expectancy of 82.3 years, means the people who insisted on this agreement believe there is a significant chance of Facebook still being around 51 years from now. By comparison Yahoo is 20 years old and not precisely in its prime, and Sun Microsystems existed only for 28 years.

That said, it means investors are betting on FB being a long lived (software) company, such as Oracle (39 years and counting), Apple (40), Microsoft (41) or, in the extreme, IBM (105).

View on HN

I thought Zuck's life clock was supposed to start flashing when he turned thirty and he was going to have to go on a Logan's Run, being much to old to run a company any more.

> Yahoo is 20 years old and not precisely in its prime, and Sun Microsystems existed only for 28 years. > such as Oracle (39 years and counting), Apple (40), Microsoft (41) or, in the extreme, IBM (105).

Of which, how many original CEO's are still at the helm?

To be fair, Bill Gates or Larry Ellison would just need to say the words and they'd get the CEO position back in a millisecond. As would Zombie Steve Jobs.

Microsoft would not replace Satya Nadella with Bill Gates at this point. One of the counter points is very clear: they forced Bill to relinquish his chairman role. The board now would never allow Bill to return as CEO unless the company was in extreme crisis and they needed a temporary leader; they successfully just pried Bill's hands off of a big point of control over Microsoft.

There's also no evidence Bill is a stronger candidate to manage the current conglomerate version of Microsoft than Satya (who appears to be doing a fine job so far). Based on the work Bill did the last several years he was actively involved, he has lost a step or three. Further, Bill's age at this point - 60 - is a serious problem, Satya can run Microsoft for 12 years before catching up to that. Jobs by comparison returned to Apple at a mere 42 years old.

You're having the wrong argument. Bill doesn't WANT the job anymore, he's doing more important things with his life now.

He owns 18% of the company.

If I was Bill Gates I wouldn't want to go back...he's so rich He can fund any idea he wants. If he goes back to Microsoft he would be under scrutiny of investors. I would say f Microsoft, f investors and do things my way for my ideas.

He won't. It's well documented that he was very miserable during his last few years at MS.

What? Where is this documented?

Well, Jobs would have been until at least his mid-late sixties if it wasn't for the unfortunate disease.

And in other lines of work, including finance, it's not rare to continue to be a CEO well into your 60s or 70s...

Arguably, Oracle, Apple, and Microsoft all offer good reasons for why you want to ensure that founders maintain control. It certainly seems that tech companies perform best when under founder control.

What does his life expectancy have to do with anything? You think he's still gonna be CEO in his 70s?

Still wearing the same gray T-shirt.

Why not? Many people have been the CEO up to their seventies...

Besides which, life expectancy is an averaged value, not a guarantee. He could get hit by a bus at 40 for all we know. Given how much Facebook is worth, it makes plenty of sense to plan for where the voting power goes.

Why not? There are plenty of CEOs in their 70s:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/06/the-14-o...

And there are a number of CEOs with multi-decade tenures:

http://fortune.com/2015/05/05/14-longest-serving-ceos/

The Bell System had something like a 70-year monopoly, and it's certainly possible that Facebook has staked out something equally enduring.

Warren Buffet is 85.

Or Nintendo. 126 years.

"Nintendo was founded as a card company in late 1889...", sure, but then by the next century FB main business model will probably be about gene engineering, not software.

In all fairness, I listed IBM and I can't imagine people referred to it as a "software" company in 1911, even if it was within the 'computing industry' such as it was back then.

Nintendo were in the game business the whole time, the type of game changed due to technology.

IBM were in the computer business, they still are its just that the industry has changed so now we think of what theybdo as software and what e.g. Dell do as the computer business

> IBM were in the computer business

Specifically, in the business of selling items to help "computers", a job title for people who computed values.

When I was young, an old oil company geophysicist told me, "I remember when a computer was a person."

Nope. Its machines were doing tabulation of data stored on punchcards. Humans were not involved in doing the calculations.

Human computers were needed for more complex mathematical operations.

I think that qualifies. Accurate and efficient storage of values through a machine is of help to the people that were operating them. Or perhaps are you implying they were computing as well as tabulating?

They were doing calculations that could be done by keeping a running total. Which meant that you could take a stack of cards and count, say, how many were men in Chicago between 25-50 years old.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulating_machine#Operation for more.

My speculative money is on VR really taking off to the point that Oculus and Oculus content become Facebook's primary source of revenue. The reason tech companies that live for so long become unrecognizable when compared to their original business is because the ones that don't pivot die.

Or Nokia, 150 years and counting.

Are we still counting for Nokia?

I mean, they still exist. They may have sold off their phone division, but as long as Cisco and Netgear are still tech companies, Nokia is still a tech company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com