Does anyone know how many options Microsoft had available as a percentage of total shares in their early days.

I wish this situation were analogous, but it is not. Microsoft was FORCED to go public against its will, because the number of shareholders in the then-private company exceeded 500; Gates made the investment bankers compete for their offering business, and when they went public, they did so as an acknowledged leader in their space. The personal computer revolution was really still new.

POET is already a public company trying to do a disruptive number on an already-mature industry; they are struggling against the legacy share infrastructure of both the initial shell into which Opal set up shop, and the issuances, options and warrants that Opal and POET (pre-Ajit) inflicted upon the current share structure in order to stay alive.

Microsoft entered the public markets with a clean share history; we are already in the public markets (on a crappy exchange to boot) with "baggage" in this department. It makes everything our leadership is doing that much harder, but that's the name of the game in disruption, and likely one of the major reasons for so much non-disclosure.