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GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

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Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#191

Post by Watabou »

fbnlsr wrote: post #115
drspacemonkey wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Gitlab's interface is better. Especially the issue board. Throw in their fully-integrated CI platform and container registry basically makes Gitlab a winner.

I'm using both Gitlab and Github for different projects, and I just can't stand Gitlab's interface. Informations are scattered all around the place and there's no distinctive way of finding the information you want. Plus it's slow as hell. Github's UI makes sense. I can find anything in the blink of an eye and it's blazing fast. The team I'm currently working with is completely fed up with Gitlab.

I agree. I couldn't stand the slowness of Gitlab's UI. I originally came to Gitlab because Bitbucket was lagging on several features that I wanted, and had a poor UI. Gitlab's UI seemed more inviting as it was similar to Github. Mostly though, I chose Gitlab for the free private repositories.

The Gitlab UI is /fine/, but the speed is what gets me. On github, even if I have thousands of commits, the UI is instantaneous. If I click on something, the load time is less than a second for me. So I switched to Github and paid for the private repositories. I absolutely didn't mind paying for this since Github is so fast for me and seems to be adding pretty cool new features (code review enhancements on PR, for example).

I still have one of my repositories on GitLab and it's still slow when I do things like browse commits, view source files, etc.

It's not just Gitlab though. Bitbucket is pretty slow for me as well, though not as slow as Gitlab. I would guess that Github's caching algorithms are much better than either of those two to really make pages seem snappy.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#192

Post by Analemma_ »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #166
Analemma_ wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can't stand on their own feet, I imagine somebody would/will buy GitHub at a firesale rather than see it disappear completely. For all their missteps, they have developer mindshare that is the envy of everyone. If we're lucky it would be someone like Google or Microsoft, if we're unlucky it might be Oracle or SalesForce. Whoever it would end up being though, GitHub won't just vanish.

I'm not sure Google or Microsoft offer hope. The former seem like it would soon shutter it as not returning added value to shareholders and the latter like they'd subtly degrade access from non MS platforms until people wished Google had bought it and shut it down. It seems like other smaller companies have exploited the profitable parts of Github's niche out from under them. I think I here a bell tolling.

> the latter like they'd subtly degrade access from non MS platforms until people wished Google had bought it and shut it down.

Maybe I'm too nice to them, but that doesn't seem like Microsoft's modus operandi anymore. These days they're all about getting people to buy more CPU cycles from Azure, rather than trying to seriously pursue Windows platform lock-in (which is a lost cause and they know it).

I imagine if Microsoft did buy GitHub, they'd have all kinds of offers like "get automated tests and CI to your Azure machines every time you push", or allowing you to host the repo on your own Azure VMs but still use the GitHub interface, stuff like that. They'd probably keep the free GitHub mostly as it is, with some nagging to upsell premium Azure stuff but nothing worse than that.

As for Google, I agree that they tend to get easily distracted and drop things, but I would hope that GitHub is popular enough (both inside and outside Google) that there would be serious pressure not to let it die on the vine. Contrast with abandonware like Wave and Google+ which never got enough mindshare that anyone felt like really fighting for it.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#193

Post by dsacco »

josho wrote: post #182
dsacco wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the idea that venture capitalists alter ("distort" is a loaded term) the market in their favor. That's part of the natural process of systems commoditizing their complements. But I really think that you characterize this in an uncharitable way with your example, which I have difficulty believing as it was stated. If your lead really understood that they would "immediately earn a 5x return with no risk",…

Yes, I purposely choose colourful language. Github is an amazing product, in part because they had $66M to spend making it amazing. Think about all of our other favourite pieces of software, and many will have the same story. This results in the marketplace having unrealistic expectations for software quality when the market size won't sustain VC levels of investment. Regarding your disbelief, you assume (like econom…

I don't assume that consumers are rational actors, at least not in the aggregate or binary sense that the term is usually used. Theories involving rational actors usually use the terminology in groups, whereas I'm talking about an individual customer and using rationality as more of a sliding scale with percentiles. In this case, it seemed incredible to me that someone would be so irrational on that scale.

However, you did clarify your example, which makes it easier to accept. Phrased this way, it seems as though a potential upside of $5,000 wasn't worth it for someone who is skeptical of your product and has free alternatives. Stated this way, I can understand how VCs cause market incentives that make your job more difficult.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#194

Post by dijit »

sctb wrote: post #61
dijit wrote: post #4

Part of me is glad the "inclusive" practices of only hiring women and minorities isn't being rewarded. At the same time, GitHub really is at the centre of opensource- how can they be losing money when they are literally the defacto code hosting site? And if they go under, who could replace them?

Please don't introduce generic controversy like this with such a tenuous connection to the discussion at hand, especially with an unsubstantiated causal implication. We're just so unlikely to learn something in the inevitable flamewar that follows.

Understood.

I was just voicing my opinion on their business. You're right that is very spuriously related and I apologise.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#195

Post by chrisabrams »

gizmo wrote: post #190
dsacco wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the idea that venture capitalists alter ("distort" is a loaded term) the market in their favor. That's part of the natural process of systems commoditizing their complements. But I really think that you characterize this in an uncharitable way with your example, which I have difficulty believing as it was stated. If your lead really understood that they would "immediately earn a 5x return with no risk",…

Perhaps you live in a world different from mine, but what you describe as "cartoonishly foolish" behavior I consider completely standard. Customers refuse to spend 5000 to make 20.000 all the time, or they're willing to waste weeks finding a different vendor that can offer the same for 3000. Others are willing to walk away from a great deal unless they get a discount, but are content with a tiny discount. Because a d…

I live in the same world as you. My business has a proven model for digital publishers that generally increases their yield 2-4x yet they refuse to spend the percentage needed to make the deal happen. Sometimes pride can be so large...spend 5k to make 50k? No thanks..lol

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#196

Post by RandomInteger4 »

gizmo wrote: post #190
dsacco wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the idea that venture capitalists alter ("distort" is a loaded term) the market in their favor. That's part of the natural process of systems commoditizing their complements. But I really think that you characterize this in an uncharitable way with your example, which I have difficulty believing as it was stated. If your lead really understood that they would "immediately earn a 5x return with no risk",…

Perhaps you live in a world different from mine, but what you describe as "cartoonishly foolish" behavior I consider completely standard. Customers refuse to spend 5000 to make 20.000 all the time, or they're willing to waste weeks finding a different vendor that can offer the same for 3000. Others are willing to walk away from a great deal unless they get a discount, but are content with a tiny discount. Because a d…

Well, much of the customer doubt has to do with companies promising things they can't deliver. The phrase "If it's too good to be true, then it probably is [too good to be true]." exists for a reason.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#198

Post by bmelton »

cstavish wrote: post #177
bmelton wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds more like a spin-off of the old investment adage: "Buy stock in the products you actually use." If you spin that argument slightly as a proxy purchase, it makes sense that VCs would be investing in the products that their other startups are using heavily. As an super-small-time investor who only owns stock in companies whose products that I use and enjoy, I can't knock them for it. For me, the logic is th…

> as I don't know if pulling venture capital is as easy as selling the stock. There's generally minimal liquidity. During a round, an existing investor may have the opportunity to sell some shares to new/other investors, but if she knows something that's not coming out during diligence, there's definitely something fishy going on. If the round is shaping up to be a major up-round, maybe an early investor wants to loc…

Sounds about right to me.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#199

Post by abfan1127 »

cpeterso wrote: post #164
josho wrote: post #102

This is an example of how VCs distort the market for other businesses. I had a recent conversation with a prospect and they took issue with the price of our software. Our app is in a specialized industry (ie. a smaller market). We charge a per use fee of $35. This fee enables our customer to immediately earn nearly $200 (a 5x return with no risk to them). Despite the significant benefit and profitability of using the…

Maybe you're charging too little ? Price is a signal of product value. The customer might be wary of getting an immediate 5x return on their $35 investment, thinking there is some trick in the value proposition. If your price matched their immediate return ($200?) then they might be more receptive because the value equation is balanced.

or the cheapsters won't even call...

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#200

Post by AceJohnny2 »

icebraining wrote: post #173
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep bringing that up, but that's missing the bigger picture: GitHub is more than just a git host, it's also a "social hub" where people can fork repos and offer changes back (pull requests), a passable bugtracker (issues), even wiki, and even web host (github.io). Many people have warned that using these added-value features makes you dependent on GitHub (Linus Torvalds has a kernel mirror on GitHub, but for…

Joey Hess' github-backup backs up everything github knows about a repository (including branches, tags, other forks, issues, comments, wikis, milestones, pull requests, watchers, and stars) to the repository. I'm sure most of these could be re-imported into an alternative service through its API, even if with some loss of fidelity. https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup

That's awesome. I need to send JoeyH more money.

(for others: he's also the creator of git-annex, an out-of-band file storage extension to git, and for a long time was the maintainer of critical parts of Debian's ecosystem. He likes to live in a yurt: http://joeyh.name/yurt/)

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