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The Cost of Developers

stratechery.com

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Re: The Cost of Developers

#51

Post by dd36 »

rsp1984 wrote: post #36
ealexhudson wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github would have had trouble getting more VC investment. According to Bloomberg, there are ~21M software developers in the world, and Github has ~24M user accounts. There's little userbase growth possible there; they would have had to start increasing revenue per user rapidly to be interesting for another VC round. Equally, on their $200M revenue (or whatever it was), they would struggle to get a multiple that would…

They could have easily become a formidable competitor to Atlassian if they extended their offering beyond just code hosting. Competing with Atlassian is actually not that hard considering how bad Atlassian is at times (I'm a customer myself). Atlassian today has a market cap of 15B. There's a lot of growth opportunities if you have >20m users.

Agree. There are some easy project management wins for Github. It’s flabbergasting that they’ve ignored them. Issue complexity and time estimates. Burn downs. Github is only part way there, why not get all the way?

Re: The Cost of Developers

#52

Post by scarface74 »

brutus1213 wrote: post #29
deltron3030 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here is what I don't get. It is far easier for github's dev community to move to an alternate than Facebook users. Unless there is revenue to back it up, I don't understand the 7.5 Billion price tag. Heck .. Docker for 10 Billion might have been plausible. What are the barriers to another entrant? This acquisition reminds me of the Minecraft acquisition. It did not make financial sense to me either. If Nadella keeps…

This acquisition was essential free.

This time, really, the profits don’t matter: Microsoft is paying by issuing about 73 million new shares of stock, which cost it nothing. (It’s a tiny dilution, given the company’s 7.7 billion shares outstanding; what’s more, the share price rose on the news, which means that existing shareholders are happy to be diluted.)

https://slate.com/business/2018/06/microsoft-github-deal-why...

Re: The Cost of Developers

#53

Post by peshkira »

ealexhudson wrote: post #25
rsp1984 wrote: post #13

There are times when I really like the thoughtful analysis on Stratechery and there are other times when I think it's a complete pile of detached-from-reality horsesh!t. Today is of the 2nd kind. What it also has is a potentially fatal weakness: no platform with user-based leverage. Sorry, what? Windows still has > 90% market share on desktop. If that isn't "user-based leverage" I don't know what is. This, by the way…

Github would have had trouble getting more VC investment. According to Bloomberg, there are ~21M software developers in the world, and Github has ~24M user accounts. There's little userbase growth possible there; they would have had to start increasing revenue per user rapidly to be interesting for another VC round. Equally, on their $200M revenue (or whatever it was), they would struggle to get a multiple that would…

According to Tim Cook yesterday, there are 20M Apple Developers. Someone is not telling it like it is :)

Re: The Cost of Developers

#54

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

scarface74 wrote: post #39
rsp1984 wrote: post #13

There are times when I really like the thoughtful analysis on Stratechery and there are other times when I think it's a complete pile of detached-from-reality horsesh!t. Today is of the 2nd kind. What it also has is a potentially fatal weakness: no platform with user-based leverage. Sorry, what? Windows still has > 90% market share on desktop. If that isn't "user-based leverage" I don't know what is. This, by the way…

Sorry, what? Windows still has > 90% market share on desktop. If that isn't "user-based leverage" I don't know what is. In the grand scheme of things. No one cares about desktop development. Walk into a VCs office and tell them that you have the next great idea for a Windows app and watch how fast you get laughed out of the office. How many developers are going to flock to writing Windows apps? As much as I hate it,…

> In the grand scheme of things. No one cares about desktop development.

Maybe no one in reality-distortion field of SV cares about Desktop, but offices are full of them and they're still running regular old desktop applications to do real work.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#55

Post by cease »

mikekchar wrote: post #42
coldcode wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At where I work we use Github Enterprise, which costs way more than Gitlab Enterprise, is not scalable, and barely cares about enterprise customers like ourselves. Gitlab on the other hand is much cheaper, is highly scalable, runs in AWS, and is responsive to requests. Ultimately to make it as a business you need to provide what the customer wants and is willing to pay. Github never did.

Have I missed something here? Why are you with Github and not Gitlab?

The commenter may not be in a position to make the decision to switch. It's also possible that changing would incur high switching costs - although I'm not sure what they'd be.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#56

Post by [deleted] »

heydenberk wrote: post #22

> the App Store dramatically lowered the barriers to entry for developers Is there any platform with higher barriers to entry than the App Store? iOS development requires a proprietary toolchain only available on Apple hardware, programming languages hardly used elsewhere, not to mention the $99/year developer fee and the litany of vague and arbitrarily enforced rules and content guidelines for App Store release.

[deleted]

Re: The Cost of Developers

#57

Post by indigochill »

hsribei wrote: post #34
jillesvangurp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, github sold out to investors, which then owned them, which then sold them out to get an exit when it turned out the company was in no shape for an IPO which is the only reasonable other exit if you are looking for a 10x ROI on a company that burned through hundreds of millions. Investors were in this for a huge exit and they just got it. In fairness, MS bought a valuable social network of essentially the ent…

Gitlab also took VC money and have an exit as their only option. Doubt they'll get as far as GitHub did though, and the option to just grow slowly into a solid independent business is off the table. Probably an acquihire with small return to investors.

A big difference being Gitlab is open source and can be self-hosted, so you can still run Gitlab on your own terms even after (insert faceless corporate entity here) buys it.

If you care about such things, anyway.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#58

Post by oblio »

brutus1213 wrote: post #29
deltron3030 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here is what I don't get. It is far easier for github's dev community to move to an alternate than Facebook users. Unless there is revenue to back it up, I don't understand the 7.5 Billion price tag. Heck .. Docker for 10 Billion might have been plausible. What are the barriers to another entrant? This acquisition reminds me of the Minecraft acquisition. It did not make financial sense to me either. If Nadella keeps…

He tripled the stock price. I doubt shareholders are sad :)

Re: The Cost of Developers

#59

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

MS paid $7.5 Billion for Github, along with its 28 Million users - it's in the first paragraph of the announcement (1)

That's around $268 per Github user.

Now MS could have probably made a site comparable to Github for 0.1% of that cost - e.g. revive codeplex, pump a few million into the design, backend, git support and user interactions.

But it wouldn't have 28M users. That's what they're paying for. That's the hard part.

1) https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-g...

Re: The Cost of Developers

#60

Post by scarface74 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #54
scarface74 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, what? Windows still has > 90% market share on desktop. If that isn't "user-based leverage" I don't know what is. In the grand scheme of things. No one cares about desktop development. Walk into a VCs office and tell them that you have the next great idea for a Windows app and watch how fast you get laughed out of the office. How many developers are going to flock to writing Windows apps? As much as I hate it,…

> In the grand scheme of things. No one cares about desktop development. Maybe no one in reality-distortion field of SV cares about Desktop, but offices are full of them and they're still running regular old desktop applications to do real work.

What are those regular old desktop apps? Apps built by Microsoft, Adobe, and a few other large companies. The bespoke internal business apps have been moving to the web for decades.
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