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Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

businessinsider.com

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Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#201

Post by severino »

lev99 wrote: post #171
severino wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the Microsoft of today is very different from the Microsoft of the nineties. If they've managed to change that much, then nothing prevents them to make the opposite turn and return to the monopolistic Microsoft as soon as a new CEO steps in. That's why I prefer Microsoft to stay away from the products and projects everybody loves. Furthermore, I don't think Microsoft has anything to contribute to GitHub.

> I don't think Microsoft has anything to contribute to GitHub. Microsoft has experience handling online code repositories and team services. Azure integration has the potential to improve deployment pipelines for many users. Microsoft has lots of experience doing things at scale, and can potentially find cost reduction maneuvers for Github. Visual Studio integration can bring more users to Github. Cooperate users ar…

Azure, VS... Yes, I know Microsoft has tons of things to offer to their customers. But not everybody in Github is into Microsoft tech. In fact, most are not. So that's what worries me: trying to tie Github to their products and strategies.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#202

Post by doorbumper »

tomnipotent wrote: post #120
ttam wrote: post #87

these talks are actually not new. the same rumor appeared back in 2016 https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/07/github-is-raising-a-second... imho, github feels a bit too slow innovating, which is kinda surprising since they are still "a startup"

GitHub has not been a startup for a few years, and it's business model is more or less mature now.

Have they ever turned a profit yet? Last I heard they were still losing money in 2017. Not what I would call mature.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#204

Post by PaulHoule »

bearcobra wrote: post #38
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Oh shit. I run Windows. I have respect for Microsoft. A lot of people do not, however, and the sense that Microsoft is ritually unclean will drive many of them away from github. It's the best thing that's happened to BitBucket and Altassian ever. If I have a choice between MS tools and Altassian tools I will usually take MS. (Visual Source Safe really did suck, but Visual Studio is not that bad...) Also, Microsoft ac…

I'd be interested to learn why there's the perspective that the LinkedIn acquisition hasn't gone well. I feel like most of the stories I've read about it have been pretty positive.

I am sure that some journalists interview PR people from Microsoft and some self-promoters who promote the idea of promoting themselves on LinkedIn and say it is great.

I think they've gone down the road of harvesting.

I don't know if anybody is left at LinkedIn rather than life coaches, scam artists, offshore development companies, self-promoters, "business development" people, salesmen who can't sell (maybe that is what "business development" means?), recruiters that can't recruit (ex. they have been contacting you for years because you once said something about Cold Fusion and they badly need somebody to move to Nome, Alaska but they never hire remotes...), people who seem to write 20 articles about data science a day that verge on word salad (you'd think if they knew that much they could write a better neural network to generate the text.) And people who are gullible enough to think that there is some value in sending somebody an InMail or using all of those search features they sell so you can do more refined searches of life coaches, self promoters, ...

Numerous design problems with how the forums work mean that good discussions get drowned out. The same fraudulent messages get spammed that were being spammed six years ago and they won't do, don't do, or can't do anything about it

LinkedIn has closed off most access to the API and you cannot get anything interesting out of it... except all of the email addresses of your contacts so if you do that "Lion" thing you will probably need to change your email address at some point. (I think many people don't know they get so much spam because they have a LinkedIn account.)

I am on the threshold of nuking my Facebook account now that I've disconnected all of the sites that I need to log in that use Facebook. I still haven't decided if I nuke my LinkedIn account or just delete 95% of my contacts.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#206

Post by koolba »

doorbumper wrote: post #202
tomnipotent wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub has not been a startup for a few years, and it's business model is more or less mature now.

Have they ever turned a profit yet? Last I heard they were still losing money in 2017. Not what I would call mature.

I’m pretty sure they’ve been profitable since the first month of private repos.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#207

Post by zmmmmm »

It's getting depressing to see that mid tier companies are all now reliably getting swallowed up by larger ones. It is starting to feel like the golden age of technology - where brand new small companies emerge and become giant ones - is waning. Were Google, Amazon and Facebook actually the last of the tech giants to emerge and from now on, it's just a procession of watching every other company merge into the existing 5 or 6 big companies? I guess it is inevitable but it still makes me sad if we are transitioning to a more mature, but fundamentally more boring phase.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#209

Post by 7952 »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #97

This has me wondering, what Microsoft wants GitHub for? It's not like they can't use it without owning it, and I doubt they want to improve it as it is. Probably they want control before integrating it with their products.

GitHub do for developers what Microsoft want to do for the rest of business through SharePoint.

Maybe they could add Office 365 editing to GitHub and pitch it as the successor to SharePoint. Or try to integrate it with their other products in some kind of Frankenstein mess.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#210

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

mimiflynn wrote: post #126

I wonder how projects like Electron are figuring into the interest that Microsoft has in GitHub. How would Microsoft move forward with such a project if they bought GitHub? Would its continue to be based on Chromium? Would future versions of Office follow VSCode and be build as Electron apps?

I was in DevDiv at the time of the launch of VS Code (but on a different team): The pressure was on to ship a cross-platform editor ASAP to support the new cross-platform .NET infrastructure. This was very much an "IBM PC"-project with the Directors tasking a small team to get something done and to disregard the NIH culture. Atom was chosen as the platform because it was already close to what they needed with the right license. Heck, the rush to ship was so intense that they screwed up the name (I forget the story exactly, but "VS Code" was not the name the MSFT naming department came up with, but the name they initially chose turned out to be used elsewhere and they didn't have the time to come up with something trademarkable so they just sighed and shipped as "Visual Studio Code").

Anyway - I think the VS Code experience helped with Microsoft's institutional "fear" of pushing ahead with a JavaScript ecosystem elsewhere - I think the knock-on effects contributed towards the Office org's recent announcement to add JS as a first-class macro language in Excel, I just wish it was TypeScript instead.

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