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GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

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Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#111

Post by fragsworth »

calcsam wrote: post #41

Both this piece, and most commenters, seem to miss the point about where Github's value comes from. It's not for being a social identity for programmers, or hosting open-source libraries. Those are worthy pursuits, but from a business perspective mostly serve as marketing. Github is basically Microsoft Word for programmers, and is an essential part of their workflow. Companies that need enterprise functionality aroun…

> That's why Github is being valued at $2B.

Also, keep in mind, we can't see the terms of this deal, and how much special treatment the investors will be getting from it.

The valuation is just an upper limit to the true measured value of the company until we can see the terms of the deal.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#112

Post by blazespin »

timr wrote: post #63
calcsam wrote: post #41

Both this piece, and most commenters, seem to miss the point about where Github's value comes from. It's not for being a social identity for programmers, or hosting open-source libraries. Those are worthy pursuits, but from a business perspective mostly serve as marketing. Github is basically Microsoft Word for programmers, and is an essential part of their workflow. Companies that need enterprise functionality aroun…

Microsoft Word became a valuable monopoly because it was a proprietary standard. But git hosting is a commodity service. There are already a number of players doing exactly what GitHub does, for less money, and it's trivially easy to migrate a repository away from GitHub to those other providers. Something tells me that the "facebook for programmers" angle is essential to selling the dream here. The so-called "networ…

Agreed, the valuation makes no sense to me. There's really no switching costs that I see.

Bitbucket is actually superior in many ways because of its tight integration with Atlassian - the real Microsoft Word of the Developer community.

Sourceforge had this kind of play at one point and look at it now.

Maybe they're going to start displaying ads for jobs for developers. Not sure that's worth 2B though...

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#113

Post by wstrange »

MarkPNeyer wrote: post #99
arikrak wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github currently may use the "social coding" part for marketing now, but it can build off it in the future. For example, StackOverflow built a whole careers site off Q&A, Github can choose to go further based on real code.

"github labs used machine learning to generate a simple english -> python translation algorithm. it crawled the millions of commits, looking at comments and commit logs to understand software"

But anyone else can do the same (at least for all of the public repos).

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#114

Post by mgkimsal »

timr wrote: post #105
zachrose wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for all the things that Github builds on top of git to keep users coming back (wiki, issues, stars, etc.) which seem to be working.

...all of which are provided by all of the other git hosting providers. Again: these are commodity features.

a diff I see missing from bitbucket is the visualization - heat graphs/maps of my activity on a project or across projects. I know it wasn't there early on, but I've known more than a few people that keep committing to a project on a daily basis because they can keep their streak going on the visual chart (on github).

It's not really one particular feature, but a whole mess of little things that, collectively, will keep github 'default choice' for a lot of folks for a long time coming - it's inherently a bit more 'social'.

That said, I'm in agreement with your view that most other services have most of the main same features anyway - I prefer bitbucket for my projects, but... I'm in a minority. This sort of feels like MS Office vs OpenOffice 15 years ago. Yeah, technically there's a lot of the same stuff, but there's enough 'missing' features from multiple users' perspectives that the larger player still 'wins'.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#115

Post by eropple »

izolate wrote: post #26
darkstar999 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seriously think censoring the word "retard" will harm their business?

Of course not, try not to think in such black and white terms. Missteps like these sow the seeds of disdain for companies. Developers are a fickle bunch, and easily hold grudges.

I don't think the loss of patronage of the set of developers willing to choose their tools based on whether they as a company allow their users to slur large groups of people is really on their radar.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#116

Post by cheald »

Fomite wrote: post #98
cheald wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it cost them my $7/mo. That decision was very disturbing to me - I've always viewed GitHub as a content-neutral platform which provided a code hosting and sharing service. Yesterday's incident seems to signal that they are willing to make political judgments about peoples' code and force their opinions into that code, and I'm just really not okay with that. This wasn't about removing something which posed a leg…

In exchange, I've started actively patronizing businesses that choose not to make "Lets indulge all speech ever!" as they hill they want to die on.

That's...rather quite a strawman. There is a huge chasm between "Let's indulge all speech ever!" and "Let's not force compliance to our political opinions on our users".

I suspect what you mean is that you are actively patronizing businesses who reinforce your current political beliefs; I doubt very much that you are patronizing businesses who engage in censorship which runs contrary to your political beliefs out of some idealistic respect for their courage to take a stand. And that's fine - we all naturally tend to support those we agree with, and not support those we disagree with - but framing it as admiration of the will to censor is just almost certainly spurious.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#117

Post by robotresearcher »

timr wrote: post #106
colechristensen wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gitlab and bitbucket aren't as good, I've tried them and more. GitHub isn't a commodity that excels only because of it happening to be popular. People choose GitHub because it's both popular and good. It has competition, some of which are better for specific circumstances, but as a whole they don't execute as well. Let me contrast with Facebook – it was only good, in my opinion, for a brief period starting in 2005 wh…

Horses for courses. Plenty of people prefer those other providers, just like plenty of people prefer one brand of toothpaste over another. Toothpaste is still a commodity product. I've never used gitlab, but I find bitbucket to be identical to github in every way that matters.

And bitbucket has unlimited private repos for free compared to github's limited number for a fee. I moved my lab repos to bitbucket when we outgrew 10 private repos. It was going to be quite expensive to add more at GitHub.

(Most of out repos are public but some things you want to keep private at first.)

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#118

Post by Retric »

timr wrote: post #63
calcsam wrote: post #41

Both this piece, and most commenters, seem to miss the point about where Github's value comes from. It's not for being a social identity for programmers, or hosting open-source libraries. Those are worthy pursuits, but from a business perspective mostly serve as marketing. Github is basically Microsoft Word for programmers, and is an essential part of their workflow. Companies that need enterprise functionality aroun…

Microsoft Word became a valuable monopoly because it was a proprietary standard. But git hosting is a commodity service. There are already a number of players doing exactly what GitHub does, for less money, and it's trivially easy to migrate a repository away from GitHub to those other providers. Something tells me that the "facebook for programmers" angle is essential to selling the dream here. The so-called "networ…

Which is why Microsoft is worth 366.8B and GitHub was only valued at less than 1% of that.

However, the name recognition that allows GitHub to charge a premium really is worth something, and I suspect they plan on leveraging that 250M to try and grow. In the end though it's not our money so we really don't have a lot of information on if it was a good bet or not.

PS: For an off the wall example, they may be planning to become a seed incubator.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#119

Post by mszyndel »

blazespin wrote: post #112
timr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Word became a valuable monopoly because it was a proprietary standard. But git hosting is a commodity service. There are already a number of players doing exactly what GitHub does, for less money, and it's trivially easy to migrate a repository away from GitHub to those other providers. Something tells me that the "facebook for programmers" angle is essential to selling the dream here. The so-called "networ…

Agreed, the valuation makes no sense to me. There's really no switching costs that I see. Bitbucket is actually superior in many ways because of its tight integration with Atlassian - the real Microsoft Word of the Developer community. Sourceforge had this kind of play at one point and look at it now. Maybe they're going to start displaying ads for jobs for developers. Not sure that's worth 2B though...

Yet to meet a developer who's as excited about using Jira as about using Github issues...

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#120

Post by Aldo_MX »

blazespin wrote: post #112
timr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Word became a valuable monopoly because it was a proprietary standard. But git hosting is a commodity service. There are already a number of players doing exactly what GitHub does, for less money, and it's trivially easy to migrate a repository away from GitHub to those other providers. Something tells me that the "facebook for programmers" angle is essential to selling the dream here. The so-called "networ…

Agreed, the valuation makes no sense to me. There's really no switching costs that I see. Bitbucket is actually superior in many ways because of its tight integration with Atlassian - the real Microsoft Word of the Developer community. Sourceforge had this kind of play at one point and look at it now. Maybe they're going to start displaying ads for jobs for developers. Not sure that's worth 2B though...

> Bitbucket is actually superior in many ways

I beg to differ: 2-factor authentication[1], you can't change your credentials[2], it's not as easy to integrate with CI tools since most devs just focus in the integration with Github, and probably there are many more ways where Bitbucket is inferior in comparison with Github.

[1] https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/5811/support-two-fa...

[2] https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/176548/how-can-i-cha...

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