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GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

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Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#141

Post by daveFNbuck »

gaius wrote: post #114
notveryrational wrote: post #66

Microsoft can not buy goodwill with me, personally. I worked at the company and was privy to "strategic conversations" whereby they were looking to regain trust with developers to get them back from Android and Google to Windows stack. Microsoft practically forced us to use Windows stack for anything and everything, even when there were much better tools. Under Satya, it was better, but the emphasis is still very muc…

Microsoft practically forced us to use Windows stack for anything and everything This is called “dogfooding” and all companies should do it. How can you sell to customers or understand customers if you’re not using the product yourself? One day I’d love to visit SAP and see how they do their own vacations and expenses. It can’t be with their own software.

Customers and potential customers also use competing products, so you also need to use those to sell to, understand, and grow your customers.

Maybe SAP uses their own software internally and they've all become power users that aren't bothered by the issues that you're having. Perhaps if they used competing products they'd have a better understanding of where theirs is lacking.

Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#142

Post by rorykoehler »

some_account wrote: post #100
iaml wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>what are developers going to do when Google inevitably acquires GitLab? Fork it and move on with their day.

You will not be able to easily move away from any dominant platform because it will be not just the code but the community you leave behind. Also it's quite possible that github will add CI stuff directly into Azure and if you start using that, there may be no other product to move to with the same functionality. Vendor lock-in is a strategy that works even if you know its there. I'm building my code with the excelle…

This is why I'm very wary of recommending any serverless solutions. All the consultants we work with are lusting for them. It's pretty hard to push back against it.

Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#143

Post by badminton1 »

outside1234 wrote: post #105
some_account wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is forcing employees to use Microsoft tools when there are better ones to solve the problem. Read that again and think about the culture they have at Microsoft, then think about the open source culture if it's the same. Do Microsoft embrace open source?

Cmon, google does the same thing, Facebook does the same thing. They are all at the scale where they can’t adopt random JavaScript framework of the week.

Google cares about ads and Facebook cares about monopolizing social graph tech with ad targeting applications.

Microsoft historically wanted to monopolize everything. Your operating system, developer tools, office suites, Internet browsers... everything.

Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#144

Post by Pywarrior »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #130
nradov wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with no real stake in this deal, why should anyone care whether Microsoft kills Github or not? There are multiple alternative Git hosting competitors and switching costs are low.

The cost to copy a repo over is low, but you lose all the social aspects. You don't copy over forks or stars. People who want to fork your repo and make pull requests need to sign up for a new service. Old links to your repo on GitHub won't work anymore. I copied my personal projects to GitLab today and that was very easy to do but I'm not sure what to do about the GitHub version for the one that had a little popular…

You could pull in all forks also.

Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#145

Post by ethomson »

some_account wrote: post #94
staticassertion wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kept reading, waiting for the insidious part. So what you're saying is that Microsoft has a company wide strategic vision to improve its relationship with developers? Did you leave some part out?

Microsoft is forcing employees to use Microsoft tools when there are better ones to solve the problem. Read that again and think about the culture they have at Microsoft, then think about the open source culture if it's the same. Do Microsoft embrace open source?

As a Microsoft employee, I use Mac, Linux and Windows regularly. I write code in vim. I write quick-and-dirty scripts in Perl or Ruby. I’ve shipped code in Java, C and C#. I browse the web in Chrome. I push to GitHub and VSTS.

Microsoft doesn’t force employees to use Microsoft tools; Microsoft forces employees to think critically, empathize with our users and build great experiences for them.

Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#146

Post by pmontra »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #130
nradov wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with no real stake in this deal, why should anyone care whether Microsoft kills Github or not? There are multiple alternative Git hosting competitors and switching costs are low.

The cost to copy a repo over is low, but you lose all the social aspects. You don't copy over forks or stars. People who want to fork your repo and make pull requests need to sign up for a new service. Old links to your repo on GitHub won't work anymore. I copied my personal projects to GitLab today and that was very easy to do but I'm not sure what to do about the GitHub version for the one that had a little popular…

I did the same. I'm replacing the README on GitHub with "Moved to https://gitlab.com/... and a description of what the software does. If people finds it interesting they will follow the link.

A fork between services becomes more complicate but not so much: git pull from GitLab and git push to GitHub or whatever. Everybody knows how to do it.

Right, one loses the "fork" link between the two repositories but really, who cares? We're writing software for work or for a cause, we shouldn't be playing a game of collecting stars and forks.

Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#147

Post by AnonymousPlanet »

badminton1 wrote: post #122

The difference between "the old Microsoft" (monopolistic, openly insulting/abusive) and "the new Microsoft" is like the difference between colonialism and neocolonialism. - Colonialism consisted in annexing territory, forcing them to use your flag, sing your anthem, and work for you under penalty of violence. - Neocolonialism consists into forcibly indebt countries, so they direct all their productive efforts into pa…

This is an insightful comment and should be read by anyone getting starry eyed over "the new Microsoft". Integrating "Linux" as a subsystem is very likely a hostile act in the same direction.

Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#148

Post by hobofan »

dragonwriter wrote: post #137
hobofan wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google acquiring Gitlab is very inevitable. GV (which is a Alphabet and not Google subsidiary) always stated that their priority is to be a VC that is as neutral as possible, and should a Google competitor be interested in acquiring a portfolio company they are open to that. Of course if you have them as an investor they will obviously try to help you with their network which can definately steer a company to a more…

> Google acquiring Gitlab is very inevitable. From the rest of your post, I think you mean “...very much not inevitable.”

No.

If the portfolio company wants to be acquired by Google, then taking the network they get via GV certainly makes that route easier for them.

If the portfolio company decides if acquisition by another tech giant is the better route, they are free to do that and GV won't sabotage that deal. AFAIK there have been GV exits to all of the big Google competitiors.

Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#149

Post by zaarn »

_nalply wrote: post #127
kokey wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as GitLab remains also deployable on your own infrastructure and not become a SaaS-only platform, I'll worry less about this.

You know that GitLab offers commercial add-ons?

You know that in most cases, they are "neat-to-have" and not essentials?

Re: GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

#150

Post by pmontra »

bad_user wrote: post #123
djsumdog wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is pretty much doing the same thing with Chrome. Opera has switched to its rendering engine and Firefox's share is dropping (after Google pumped tons of money in them and used their work to enhance their own offering). Gecko is barely on the map while Google's render can be found in newer versions of Opera, Vivaldi, and others. I mean if you go back far enough, Microsoft did this with IE. IIRC, they licensed a…

> Firefox's share is dropping Firefox's share was never very high to beginning with, because Mozilla doesn't have the resources to play the vendor bundled game that Microsoft and Google have been playing. And now it's rising again, because they've made great improvements in Quantum and are on a roll. I use Firefox and it really is the best browser, at least for me. The only problem that Firefox has at this point is t…

Firefox share was about 30% in 2010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
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