Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 567 posts

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#491

Post by ptx »

tomsiw wrote: post #489
AgentK20 wrote: post #6

Really hope these talks fall through and nothing comes of it. Too many bad experiences with Microsoft buying something out, mismanaging it, and it goes down the drain. As much as I love GitHub, I won't be using a Microsoft-owned GitHub for any of my company's work.

The list of key MS acquisitions isn't that long and out of several products only Nokia is a definite failure. Skype gotten worse but I wouldn't count it as failure just yet. Remaining big acquisitions (Forethought PowerPoint, Hotmail, Visio, Navision Dynamics, LinkedIn) where rather successful.

Success for Microsoft doesn't mean success for the users of the acquired product, e.g. Skype users on Linux, and anyone using RoboVM.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#492

Post by organicmultiloc »

d0lph wrote: post #135
AgentK20 wrote: post #6

Really hope these talks fall through and nothing comes of it. Too many bad experiences with Microsoft buying something out, mismanaging it, and it goes down the drain. As much as I love GitHub, I won't be using a Microsoft-owned GitHub for any of my company's work.

If it were maybe 5 years ago I would be horrified, but under Nadella they are a lot less ... Microsoft-y.

I don't know why every massive corporation is trying to rebrand as "the friendly AI conglomerate!" but I'm not buying it for Microsoft or anyone else.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#493

Post by AsyncAwait »

kyberias wrote: post #487
lwhalen wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us are old enough to remember Microsoft of the 90's and early aughties. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" was the name of the game then, many of us haven't forgiven Microsoft for that yet (and nor do we plan to).

Right, I know that, and that's just idiotic behavior. You should concentrate on what is happening today, not what happened decades ago and hold grudges. That attitude leads you into unhappy places.

Forgiving them too easily shows them that they can get off the hook easily, which isn't a good thing either.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#494

Post by chiph »

philliphaydon wrote: post #396
cm2187 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shall we talk Nokia...

Buying Nokia wasn’t the issue. Microsoft’s handling of Nokia was the issue. Microsoft is not good at making a physical product and releasing it to the world like Apple and Samsung. The fact many countries had to wait > 12 months to get the latest phone was retarded. Windows phone was awesome, but Microsoft screwed themselves by not doing minimum what it’s competitors were doing.

I had the top-of-the-line Nokia Lumia 920 (designed just before the acquisition), and the plastic case was too soft and collected dents & scratches like crazy. The matte finish was also too slippery to hold onto (I ended up putting some skateboard tape on it).

OTOH, I found the Windows Phone operating system to be highly responsive and I was able to navigate screens more quickly than the previous iPhone or the current Android I have. The problem was that as third-place in the market, few apps were available for it, and those that were weren't being maintained.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#495

Post by monodeldiablo »

This seems, to me, to illustrate perfectly how Microsoft still doesn't understand open source as an idea nor as a culture. The whole movement exists as a reaction against central, corporate control.

Large companies think that, by acquiring important hosted open source infrastructure, they'll somehow acquire the users or act as gatekeepers. But open source tooling is so decentralized these days that is not easy to be a captive user. The cost of switching is so low -- plenty of other comparable services supply collaborative utilities for git -- that, for most projects, a weekend spent altering URLs and configs should suffice.

If such a deal goes through, Microsoft will spend millions on the acquisition and, simultaneously, alternative providers who appear more independent (Gitlab, BitBucket, etc) will see a surge in new accounts.

And I, for one, think it'd be a good thing for open source. Every time an OSS sugar daddy turns on its users -- SourceForge, BitKeeper, Oracle, SCO, etc -- the community has grown more robust, more decentralized, and more resilient.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#497

Post by isostatic »

philipov wrote: post #113
banachtarski wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has been changing a lot. Embracing linux in their cloud offering, offering unix as a subsystem on Windows, open sourcing their work. Anyone who likens the current MSFT to anything resembling what it was in the 90s hasn't been paying attention to the current leadership.

Windows 10's forced updates and telemetry say otherwise.

Automatic updates are great, I use it on most of my dev servers

I could even see that defaulting auto update to "on" is a good move too. If you know what you're doing you can turn them off.

I haven't adminned a windows machine since '98 -- can you really. Or turn off automatic windows updates?

As for any telemetry stuff, that should be opt in, and have a target server to send to, which you can point to your own box if you want to.

Microsoft today is different to Microsoft in the 90s though. In the 90s it was a software company that used embrace extend extinguish to maintain and extend its monopolies, but it wrote software and the software was the product.

Now it seems it uses the "user is the product" ala Google, Facebook etc. I'm not aware of apple doing that. Still I guess inevitable as companies penny pinch more and more.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#498

Post by emodendroket »

Sylos wrote: post #442
emodendroket wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what you're on about. C# is basically a "better Java" so there's no particular reason you can't write good software in it.

That's very subjective. C# has tons of useless keywords that you just know some arrogant dev is going to use because they can, which then no junior can work with. It also has a worse ecosystem for writing server software (while obviously a better ecosystem for writing Windows applications) and is less suitable for cross-platform work.

It is subjective, but things like genetics and reflection I think are better in C#. I am not sure which keywords you think are "useless." Either way though, they're quite similar. There is no innate quality about C# where the code has to be terrible and the only hope is a total rewrite in something else.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#499

Post by erk__ »

coldseattle wrote: post #331
prepend wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know, isn’t Microsoft the only software company left? I love Google, but they sell ads, their mission isn’t to make software. Microsoft is more and more cloud and services, but they still have a developer mentality and they have done some good stuff with open source lately. If someone is going to buy Github, Microsoft is probably the most friendly to developers. Unless Google or Facebook wants to go full altr…

Adobe.

And another big one is Autodesk

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#500

Post by AsyncAwait »

lev99 wrote: post #193
gsich wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telemetry is bad, forced updates is not.

Forced updates are bad. 1. Updates can introduce breaking changes. 2. Windows will restart the computer to update, potentially interrupting processes. 3. Users should have freedom to use software in the way that they choose, and not have actions forced on them by the software. I understand that many windows users are far from power users and the forced updates provide security updates. My point of view is anyone will…

> Users should have freedom to use software in the way that they choose, and not have actions forced on them by the software.

Agreed, but this had only ever actually been true with free software.

Post reply on HN