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

GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 366 posts

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

#191

Post by zyx321 »

megaman22 wrote: post #108
djsumdog wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like a page out of The Dictators Handbook: > First, politics is about getting and keeping political power. It is not about the general welfare of "We, the people." Or I guess here, 'we the developers.' I don't think Microsoft is at all alone in this spot. Github got a huge payout from this. It benefited them. We don't think of them as a Microsoft style company, but they made the same decision we might have seen…

Oculus is vaporware, right? I don't see anything that encourages me that whatever thing they were aiming at will be a thing?

It's not vaporware. It's available for purchase, and it fulfills its advertised purpose as a video game peripheral. The ecosystem of available games could be better, but it's far from stillborn.

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

#192

Post by jlgaddis »

chris_wot wrote: post #27
jlgaddis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when they still didn’t “get it”? It’s a great read (and good for a few laughs) for “nerds”, sure, but it still doesn’t explain to non-techies what Github is (besides “some thing that programmers use instead of e-mail”) — or, more importantly, why it’s worth $7.5B.

It does explain it. He wrote that “Git keeps track of changes in sets of files.”

That doesn't really explain it, though.

"You mean like 'Track changes' in Word?"

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

#193

Post by santaragolabs »

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.

I've done some security contracting work for the folks in Walldorf over the years; I've seen first-hand some SAP FTE's getting insanely frustrated putting in their expenses in their own systems. Which was pretty hilarious to watch. And most folks there fully acknowledge that usability is not their strength traditionally.

Things like uptime, support-contracts, having someone on-site within three hours when your multi-millon-dollar-order-processing-SAP-cluster goes down etc are what matter to their customers more than usability (traditionally).

Things are changing and a lot of effort has been put into getting better at UI/UX though. But I haven't been involved with them for several years now so I don't know where they are at or what their current offerings are (I keep tabs a bit on HANA developments but that's it really).

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

#194

Post by robocat »

adrianN wrote: post #180
fjsolwmv wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why FSF tried to move from GPL to AGPL. But companies are obviously not interested until they have a next gen business model and SaaS/PaaS is commoditized.

Your hear many people here on HN actively discouraging the use of the AGPL because it prevents software from being used by companies. Goes to show how well the PR departments work.

Or maybe people have their own reasons to avoid AGPL - no need to assume they are victims of PR.

For example I avoid the GPL for our business because I use JavaScript, and it seems to me all of our JavaScript code would need to be open sourced if we used any GPL based JavaScript code (because JavaScript is source code and it isn't linked).

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

#195

Post by exceptione »

simonh wrote: post #116
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…

So Google is bad because they poured millions of dollars into Mozilla for Firefox development, but even so their own browser is still better and more popular, and the code is open for other projects to use. Which is a bad, evil thing to do and we want none of that round here! And this is the same as developing a crummy browser, not sharing the code and not funding any alternate implementations, and leaving it stagnan…

«So Google is bad because they poured millions of dollars into Mozilla for Firefox development, »

No. Google paid for having its search engine in firefox (as the default engine).

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

#196

Post by [deleted] »

hobofan wrote: post #148
dragonwriter wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#197

Post by saagarjha »

redial wrote: post #101
saagarjha wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The upside for you is that if you have a watch app and your competitor doesn't, customers are going to choose your product over theirs.

That is what in theory you think happens. What actually happens is that in very few app categories that is the case. For example, not a single game is losing market share to a competitor because they do not have a watch app.

You picked the worst example here: you really can't play (serious) games on your watch, so the comparison is invalid. But for a fitness app, or a messaging one, or a music service, I would significantly favor the service that has a watch counterpart, if not shun the other one outright.

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

#198

Post by marenkay »

With there being so much talk how Microsoft is reformed/reforming, I do not really see the change at all.

Microsoft always was about developers and getting them into their ecosystem and I do not think this is evil. It's business.

People act like the Open Source strategy is so much different from the Ballmer days but is it really? From a business perspective they tried to throw rocks into the paths of Open Source as a thing, and it did not work. It just alienated more developers. Logical conclusion is to blend in. And so they did.

Apart from that, with Open Source being kind of a de facto default for the past decade, it just becomes so much harder to find engineers who would work at a company not respecting the ideas behind Open Source development.

Microsoft is now sitting at the focal point for the majority of Open Source efforts. And it has a kill switch in its' hands.

The reformed Microsoft is the old Microsoft. It just learned a few tricks from the Open Source community.

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

#199

Post by oever »

hliyan wrote: post #17

I'm listening to the audiobook version of Nadella's Hit Refresh these days. It does sound like he had thought through the open source strategy from very early on. There he says something to the effect that Microsoft had so many things in-house that were better than what some other companies were publicly showcasing, but they were hiding them away for some reason.

> they were hiding them away for some reason

Why sell better things when your customers are locked-in and you can force them to buy garbage?

Big companies are reactive. They have no need to innovate. In fact, innovation usually harms business. Domination via lock-in is much more lucrative. GitHub offers lock-in via the social developer graph.

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

#200

Post by mdpopescu »

notveryrational wrote: post #91
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?

Nothing where they are going to gas all the developers or something. Nope. It's more about priorities and intentions. Microsoft doesn't care about the developers. It cares about having the dominant platform. It recognizes that its image makes that difficult. The GitHub acquisition: Microsoft didn't suddenly get more beautiful. It put on a mask. It will kill GitHub - or at least let it flounder - if that's what's best…

> Microsoft doesn't care about the developers. It cares about having the dominant platform.

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." (Adam Smith.)

I don't trust benevolent people. I trust self-interest. I don't need to offer my undying allegiance to Microsoft - I can like them as long as they do things that benefit me, and dislike them when they don't.

Post reply on HN