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The Cost of Developers

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Re: The Cost of Developers

#4

The purchase of github doesn't make immediate financial sense to me. This article posted a reason - to stave off Windows decline. While it is plausible, I still don't see it.

Which MS acquisition did make sense? Skype? Nokia? LI? Yammer?

Re: The Cost of Developers

#5
Great analysis, although I don't completely agree with this statement: "GitHub, a company that, having raised $350 million in venture capital, was not going to make it as an independent entity."

If it is referring to the fact that, in the crazy VC spiral of the startups world, once you have received such a big investment, a sale to a big corp is the only choice, then I sadly agree. But GitHub could have been an independent entity with a sustainable business, if they had not fallen into VC's startups trap. I have to agree with DHH here: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1003611913924894720. We need more independent software companies instead of only having 5 big players.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#6

The purchase of github doesn't make immediate financial sense to me. This article posted a reason - to stave off Windows decline. While it is plausible, I still don't see it.

The reason? Simple. Developer mindshare. Microsoft lost it with Ballmer, and is getting it back under Satya. Ultimately Microsoft's success has always stemmed from providing platforms that support developers, and in turn they build great products people will pay for. And that drives Microsoft revenues, be it the OS, or nowadays, SaaS PaaS and IaaS (and OS).

Re: The Cost of Developers

#7

The purchase of github doesn't make immediate financial sense to me. This article posted a reason - to stave off Windows decline. While it is plausible, I still don't see it.

In my view it's a longer term proposition to gain more customers for Azure/Microsoft Cloud. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon all see the future of computing as being in the cloud.

If Microsoft can integrate Azure and GitHub to make it easier for developers to deploy and run their code in the cloud, then that means more Azure customers.

This likely means that GCP and AWS integrations will take second place.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#8

The purchase of github doesn't make immediate financial sense to me. This article posted a reason - to stave off Windows decline. While it is plausible, I still don't see it.

Same here. I think there's another reason that's not so apparent

Cultural reasons maybe. The Ruby/Rails community Github is also part of fits into the overall strategy of cultural change towards a more design and UX centric brand, that is recognized and respected by other designers beyond being just a tool for CAD modeling.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#9

The purchase of github doesn't make immediate financial sense to me. This article posted a reason - to stave off Windows decline. While it is plausible, I still don't see it.

In my view it's a longer term proposition to gain more customers for Azure/Microsoft Cloud. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon all see the future of computing as being in the cloud. If Microsoft can integrate Azure and GitHub to make it easier for developers to deploy and run their code in the cloud, then that means more Azure customers. This likely means that GCP and AWS integrations will take second place.

They already do so.

They had a joint presentation at BUILD 2018, how to have a full CI/CD pipeline in Azure, with code taken from Github.

Now in retrospective, maybe the talks were already ongoing.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#10

The purchase of github doesn't make immediate financial sense to me. This article posted a reason - to stave off Windows decline. While it is plausible, I still don't see it.

In my view it's a longer term proposition to gain more customers for Azure/Microsoft Cloud. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon all see the future of computing as being in the cloud. If Microsoft can integrate Azure and GitHub to make it easier for developers to deploy and run their code in the cloud, then that means more Azure customers. This likely means that GCP and AWS integrations will take second place.

That doesn't make sense to me. GitHub integration is already pretty easy, the GitHub API is fine.

Heroku for example is already pretty well integrated with GitHub, and they didn't have to buy anything.

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