Why "cd ~ && mkdir -p nat/next" instead of just "mkdir -p ~/nat/next"?
Thank you, GitHub
241–250 of 460 posts
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Money is not the only part of any large acquisition such as GitHub. Given Microsoft's history, GitHub was the perfect acquisition for their goals.
Sure it was, and for MS there is definitely strategic value in owning Github. But I even if you factor in that strategic value, Github is not as important to Microsoft as, say, Instagram is to Facebook.
Instagram is likely the greatest acquisition of all time in terms of synergy and mainly financial gains.
Instagram is worth hundreds of billions now. Bought for $1B. It is an actual unicorn situation of being incredibly rare.
There’s no point bringing up something so rare.
For example, the only other [tech?] acquisition that I can think of even sniffing IG is Priceline (now Bookings Holdings) acquiring Bookings.com for a couple hundred million. Now being the core of the business.
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Beyond that. Just to be geeky about this stuff. The only other general financial deals in this ballpark are SoftBank, Yahoo, and Naspers investments. Copy pasting previous comment:
SoftBank and Yahoo bought around 40% stakes each in Alibaba. SoftBank spent $20M in 1999, the year Alibaba was founded. Alibaba owned 34% as of the mid 2010s. Now own 26%. Yahoo, because of Jerry Yang, invested $1B in 2005.
Naspers invested $32M for almost 50% of Tencent in 2001. Probably the best investment ever. Naspers split into two companies. Prosus owns the remaining close to 30% stake now. Though Naspers and Prosus both own around one half of one another.
All three investing companies have had issues with their own valuations. They’ve all had their own market caps be undervalued. Their one investment alone usually was close to or even exceeded the entire market cap of the company. Still the case for SoftBank and Prosus.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll take the "con" side. A lot of the core Rubyists left for Shopify after the sale, and I'm sure Nat had a contract to stay on for X amount of time, where Microsoft would make no major changes. Now that this is expiring, I fully expect Microsoft to start making changes with the site that will appeal to large corporations, at the expense of what I would prefer, as an individual user. I guess time will tell.
Nat comes from the Microsoft side, not the GitHub side.
You are technically right, but Nat comes from Microsoft's acquisition of Xamarin. He definitely is not a lifelong Microsoft employee.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#244There seems to be a lot of confusion in the HN community about Nat originally coming from Github. He was already a Microsoft employee at the time Github was aquired.
That confusion alone speaks books on how well Microsoft integrated Github under his tenure. Kudos.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#245Why "cd ~ && mkdir -p nat/next" instead of just "mkdir -p ~/nat/next"?
Popping the stack so to speak before embarking on the next ____.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#246Nat was a great CEO. The best that could have happened to Github after the acquisition IMO. The one time that I won't forget about Github under Nat, was when they stood up for Iranian developers [1]. They went the extra distance to get a permission/license from the US government specially to offer full Github to developers from Iran. Many other companies didn't do something similar. [1]: https://github.blog/2021-01-0…
"They went the extra distance to get a permission/license from the US government specially to offer full Github to developers from Iran."
Wait, that's a thing ?
We get a signup from Iran about once every month and I always, apologetically, send a personal note saying that I wish we could provide service to them but ...
You're saying rsync.net can legally provide service to Iranians with ... some paperwork ?
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#247I should say that back in the day Nat was one that got me into coding. His nat.org blog (unfortunately cannot find it anymore on archive) was such an authentic piece of writing with his Xamarin and GNOME adventures along with posts and great photography on his general coding life working for OSS and other smallerish companies such as Novell. It was truly inspiration and made me want to live that life - building cool…
His blog seems to be excluded from archive.org, but I have found archived copies elsewhere. I don't want to link directly but you can find it with a little searching for his "Evolution for Windows" blog post from 2005.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#248As acquisitions go, this has probably been one of the best executed ones in recent history. MS deserves a lot of credit for having managed that very well. And I'm sure a lot of that is also due to Nat's management.
I'll take the "con" side. A lot of the core Rubyists left for Shopify after the sale, and I'm sure Nat had a contract to stay on for X amount of time, where Microsoft would make no major changes. Now that this is expiring, I fully expect Microsoft to start making changes with the site that will appeal to large corporations, at the expense of what I would prefer, as an individual user. I guess time will tell.
Aside that Nat came from Microsoft, they made already tons of changes to GitHub. Both for the Enterprise and for the public open source.
I do not see any indication about that being bound to a contract. They are also promoting the chief product officer which indicates that he did so far a good job. Which means, we can expect that they continue like they have done in the last year.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nat comes from the Microsoft side, not the GitHub side.
You are technically right, but Nat comes from Microsoft's acquisition of Xamarin. He definitely is not a lifelong Microsoft employee.
I don't think that matters in the context of what's being discussed here.
If there were any retention contracts that came with GitHub acquisition, that probably didn't apply to him.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#250Nat was a great CEO. The best that could have happened to Github after the acquisition IMO. The one time that I won't forget about Github under Nat, was when they stood up for Iranian developers [1]. They went the extra distance to get a permission/license from the US government specially to offer full Github to developers from Iran. Many other companies didn't do something similar. [1]: https://github.blog/2021-01-0…
"They went the extra distance to get a permission/license from the US government specially to offer full Github to developers from Iran." Wait, that's a thing ? We get a signup from Iran about once every month and I always, apologetically, send a personal note saying that I wish we could provide service to them but ... You're saying rsync.net can legally provide service to Iranians with ... some paperwork ?
Definitely a thing.
Regarding the cost, it might be more than "some paperwork".