October 12 in business history: a horse race for a wedding, a $6,500 black cube, and $67 billion for storage
Three 12 Octobers — the wedding that began Oktoberfest in 1810, the NeXT Computer's debut in 1988, and Dell's $67 billion purchase of EMC in 2015 — each decided by which part of the thing turned out to carry the value.
Three 12 Octobers, each decided by which part of the thing turned out to carry the value.
A horse race for a wedding, and the ring it left behind
On 12 October 1810, Munich celebrated the wedding of Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria and Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen. Andreas Michael Dall'Armi, an officer of the Bavarian National Guard, suggested marking it with a horse race, and King Max I Joseph approved the idea 1. The festivities ran five days and closed on 17 October with the race, run on meadow outside the city gates that Munich named the Theresienwiese for the bride 1.
The wedding happened once. The value came from repeating it. The Bavarian agricultural association took the festival over in 1811, Munich made it an annual civic event in 1819, and a decree of 1825 capped the number of Munich beer vendors at eighteen 1. By 1907 the big breweries' halls had replaced the stalls 1.
About six million people visit each year, and they drink six to seven million litres of beer 2. Only six established Munich breweries may pour: Augustiner, Hacker-Pschorr, Löwenbräu, Paulaner, Spaten and the Hofbräuhaus 3. A Munich Regional Court decision of 17 January 1990 calls the Wiesn the "festival of Munich beer" 3.
Tent proprietors set the price, and the city checks it against Munich's large restaurants. A litre at the 2026 festival sold for €14.80 to €15.90, an average 2.38 per cent above 2025, against €7.70 to €13.40 downtown 2.
Decision mirror: Munich kept the ground, the calendar and the ring of permitted suppliers. The International Olympic Committee runs the same structure: its TOP programme, created in 1985, sells category-exclusive rights to a fixed group of fifteen global partners, who pay more than $2 billion in a four-year cycle 4.
The black cube that outlived itself as software
On 12 October 1988, Steve Jobs unveiled the NeXT Computer at a gala in San Francisco, three years after Apple had pushed him out of the company he co-founded 5. The machine was a one-foot magnesium cube holding a 25MHz Motorola 68030 processor, a magneto-optical drive, a 17-inch grayscale display and a digital signal processor 6. It ran NeXTSTEP, an object-oriented operating system built on Unix, and sold to universities for $6,500 6.
Sales stayed small enough that NeXT left the hardware business in 1993, cut 230 of its 530 staff and renamed itself NeXT Software 6. The software had already travelled: Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser and the first web server on a NeXT machine at CERN, and Doom and Quake were developed on them 6.
On 20 December 1996 Apple agreed to buy NeXT for about $429 million, bringing Jobs back as an adviser 7. NeXTSTEP became Rhapsody, then Mac OS X, then macOS, and the systems that followed it 6.
Decision mirror: Apple's revenue in the quarter ended 27 June 2026 was $109.4 billion, roughly 255 times what it paid for NeXT 8. The cube lasted five years; the operating system it introduced is still shipping.
The $67 billion that was paid in somebody else's stock
On 12 October 2015 Dell and EMC announced a definitive agreement: EMC shareholders would receive $24.05 a share in cash plus a tracking stock tied to part of EMC's economic interest in VMware 9. Priced off VMware's 7 October close, the package came to about $33.15 an EMC share and the transaction to roughly $67 billion, the largest technology deal to that date 9.
Michael Dell, his MSD Partners, Silver Lake and Singapore's Temasek supplied the equity, and Dell's release said the equity and debt were already in place 9. The visible business was storage; the part the price tracked was the virtualisation company EMC controlled 9.
The deal closed on 7 September 2016, creating Dell Technologies, a company with $74 billion of revenue 10. On 1 November 2021 Dell spun off its 81 per cent of VMware; VMware paid an $11.5 billion special dividend, and Dell's $9.3 billion share went to paying down debt 11.
Decision mirror: In November 2023 Broadcom closed its purchase of VMware for about $69 billion, more than Dell had paid for all of EMC 1213. Broadcom ended perpetual licences and bundled about 8,000 product codes into a few packages, moving customers onto subscriptions 13. Ars Technica reported customers whose VMware bills rose 300 per cent, and AT&T claimed Broadcom proposed a 1,050 per cent increase and sued 13.
Three questions for the day
- If the price you are paying rests on one asset inside the target, who keeps that asset working after the close?
- Which part of what you are selling would still stand if the rest of it stopped?
- When your advantage is a closed list of suppliers, what holds the list shut?
References
- 1Landeshauptstadt München, "The history of Oktoberfest"
oktoberfest.de
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- 5Computer History Museum, "October 12: Steve Jobs introduces NeXT Computer"
computerhistory.org
- 6Wikipedia, "NeXT"
en.wikipedia.org
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- 12Broadcom, "Broadcom completes acquisition of VMware," 22 November 2023
investors.broadcom.com
- 13
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