Wouldn't surprise me if os x is hard coded to display its own apps more favorably. Brings to mind how apple hard coded the wireless signal bars to display better AT&T signal on the original iPhone to boost sales.
$ say -v "Bad News" "Unfortunately your role has been eliminated and you will no longer have a role at patch. Today will be your last day of employment with the company"
Doesn't matter what the financial situation is. Are they acquiring you because your product stinks but you and your team is awesome? Then what are they paying money for? Why would anyone pay 5x to shut it down?
Plenty of acquisitions follow that logic. If you have a large profitable business and a small competitor comes forward with a new business model that might someday be highly disruptive of yours then you try and quantify that risk and compare that potential future loss against the cost of acquiring that small competitor now.
Whether you kill the new product after acquisition or integrate it or keep working on it in house is just another business decision. If the old model is much more profitable per user than the new then it may make good sense to buy and shut down a few upstarts just to extend the lifetime of your highly profitable existing business.
I don't know anyone who considers this kind of thing as their primary exit strategy but in my experience it's common for founders to consider that "threaten a big corps market enough that they acquire you to shut it down" is at least a possibility.
I think it's fairly obvious that a lot of what get presented as an "acqui-hire" is actually mostly based on this evaluation of the market. But it's bad PR to admit you are attempting to create/protect a "monopoly".
