It was free, which is appealing for start up companies.

- You can use emacs do anything - Emacs totally configurable. - You feel better than vim user.

The best thing about GNU Make is how it integrates with the user's installed shell commands and applications. This makes it great to write batch processing scripts for all sort of tasks, beyond just compilation automation. It also makes automatic timestamp checking of produced files so that it doesn't have to repeat steps unnecessarily. It also has support for parallel execution of tasks. Also, it's command language is simpler than Microsoft's BAT and other shell script formats, a plus for writing scripts manually. Since GNU Make (and UNIX make tool by extension) are old and time-tested tools there is also lot's of support for it, with things like libtool, automake and Cmake helping with the generation of makefiles for complex compilation workflows.