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The Cost of Developers

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Re: The Cost of Developers

#181

Post by beauzero »

Retric wrote: post #162
pythonaut_16 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the standpoint of an end user (which is all of the people complaining about Microsoft acquiring Github) VCs and their money are the bad guys, because the dynamics of their investment is what causes the acquisitions which change the service in ways that I (the end user) do not like. Not saying they're right or wrong (I think at the very least it's a limited point of view) but that's the argument being made.

Users love the VC's money. Uber handed out multiple billions of dollars subsidizing both riders and drivers from these massive investments, but even smaller investments often mean the same things. From photo sharing to local delivery most of these services are beloved in large part because they don't need to be directly profitable.

...yet. "Directly or indirectly profitable" eventually happens.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#182

Post by x0x0 »

jasode wrote: post #167
jillesvangurp wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are extrapolating an opinion that I don't have. I don't consider the founders, investors, or MS evil. The only mildly controversial thing here is that a big corporation like Microsoft with a long history of hostility towards anything OSS ended up buying the goto gathering place for the OSS community. I don't think that ever was a dream scenario for any of the early founders or early adopters of that company. It w…

> I don't consider the founders, investors, or MS evil. Fair point if I overstated your perspective on VCs. I don't know if English is your primary language but if you didn't know, the phrase "sold out" is virtually always used in a derogatory manner. When one writes " sold out to " , the is the proverbial bad guy. It's also parsed as an insult to both and . E.g. "It's a shame that guitarist sold out to BadMusic Reco…

Well, the founders certainly are (as near as I can tell) letting MSFT and their VCs take heat for a decision the founders alone made.

Taking $350m in VC means you promise to build a stupidly profitable company or sell it to a high bidder. That's the deal, and it's completely understood by anyone in a position to raise nine figures of VC.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#183

Post by IloveHN84 »

Pretty Apple-oriented article.

Sure, Apple has created a platform, but at which cost? You are obliged to develop for iOS, OSX only having an Apple computer. The platform has no escape rooms.

Windows has extended the .Net to run even on Linux and you can build Windows applications from other OSes as well. The flexibility is in the tooling and MS knows it - see how dramatically improved Visual Studio in latest releases and now compare it with Xcode: what's new in Xcode 10? The Dark mode, what else?

The author still forgets that actually the ultimate gaming platform is still a PC with Windows. Mobile gaming has improved, but the best gaming experience (VR and not) runs on bare metal PCs.

Apple just decided to ditch OpenGL and OpenCL in favour of Metal - this will backfire in the near future, because developers look for easy tooling which allow them to use fewer but high quality APIs and not three thousands (e.g. Vulkan, UWP).

Re: The Cost of Developers

#184

Post by megaman22 »

pythonaut_16 wrote: post #100
jasode wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>, github sold out to investors, >Investors were in this for a huge exit I think these excerpts from your comment and also DHH's "VCs need their pound of flesh" are not helpful for readers on how to analyze the situation. They (maybe unintentionally) taint the discussion. Github is an entity owned by human beings. The founders included Chris Wanstrath, Tom Preston-Werner, PJ Hyett, and Scott Chacon. Therefore, emphas…

From the standpoint of an end user (which is all of the people complaining about Microsoft acquiring Github) VCs and their money are the bad guys, because the dynamics of their investment is what causes the acquisitions which change the service in ways that I (the end user) do not like. Not saying they're right or wrong (I think at the very least it's a limited point of view) but that's the argument being made.

I can't think of anybody that would be better to acquire GitHub, if it had to be sold off.

At least Microsoft is heavily invested in developer tools, and making them better all the time.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#185

Post by megaman22 »

dd36 wrote: post #150
icc97 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes it's worth it to stick to what you're good at. If Github burnt a ton of cash to try and compete with Jira, ended up making a product that didn't attract enough people over at the same time as ignoring problems that users were already grumbling about, this could have led to them being in a worse state and easier for MS to pick up on the cheap.

If it cost a ton of cash, that would be ridiculous. It is adding some fields and charts. Do you think Zenhub has or had a ton of cash?

If it was so easy to make a decent project management tool, there would be one...

Re: The Cost of Developers

#186

Post by hinkley »

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.

I used to work for an Atlassian competitor and the feeling in the company was a sense of intimidation.

Now that I’m a customer, it’s really ridiculous how badly their stuff is integrated. I mean, when I find myself wishing for the good old days of using Trac pre-1.0 because at least it fucking works and I don’t have to log in four times while working a ticket through code review and into a deployment. I mean Jesus Christ Atlassian, you're on version 6 and you can’t make SSO painless, and every time I type in a ticket number into an input field behaves differently.

Why hasn’t a competitor eaten their lunch yet?

Re: The Cost of Developers

#187

Post by lev99 »

zaat wrote: post #179
lev99 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If so, does it really matters that so many users are using windows if they consume apps mainly with their (probably, chrome) browser? Windows is monetizing Telemetry data, which does have meaning and value, even for people that never leave chrome.

As far as we, the general public, know for certain, telemetry is used to gather usability and preferences data, and bugs. You can avoid using their software if you are concerned about your privacy, that's totally legitimate, You can also warn others about it, if you wish so and believe that it is an important cause. I'll walk most of that walk with you. But I believe you have no justification for your accusation.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/micro...

This suggests it is used for advertisements.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#188

Post by kgwgk »

scarface74 wrote: post #52
brutus1213 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-wh…

Using overvalued stock could make the acquisition “cheaper” than the sticker price (not really free). However, they’ve said they’ll do extraordinary buybacks to cancel the dilution in six months following the transaction. So unless the price of MSFT shares has a large correction during that period they are really going to spend over $7bn in cash.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#189

Post by scarface74 »

kgwgk wrote: post #188
scarface74 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-wh…

Using overvalued stock could make the acquisition “cheaper” than the sticker price (not really free). However, they’ve said they’ll do extraordinary buybacks to cancel the dilution in six months following the transaction. So unless the price of MSFT shares has a large correction during that period they are really going to spend over $7bn in cash.

Just to add to your response and making assumptions about how you came up with the $7 billion....

The new stock is about 1% of the total number of shares outstanding. Thier total market cap is around. $785 billion. If they did a stock buyback to cancel the dilution it would be 7.85 billion.

My numbers are rounded - the new stock is actually less than 1% and the market cap as of right now is a little less than 785 billion so around 7 billion is more accurate.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#190

Post by daok »

rkeene2 wrote: post #122
pythonaut_16 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's awful. Not even comparable to Github and GitLab

I second this. I tried to use it when it was launched because it purported support for a build farm, but it was too terrible to figure out how to use it and I gave up after a couple of hours of trying to figure out how to make it do ANYTHING useful.

You should give it back a try, they have been improved quite a lot since all these years.
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