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Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

businessinsider.com

271–280 of 567 posts

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair they haven't screwed up LinkedIn. I think they will let GitHub grow with their resources.

How about Skype, though? People loved Skype so much, it was really a feat to make people hate it.

They undoubtedly did a bad job, but I think that Skype has a lot going against it from external factors anyway.

Everyone I know is using FaceTime or Facebook Messenger. The only time I hear Skype anymore is people using it for podcasts. Obvious anecdata but it seems reasonable that services with better device integration (FaceTime) or social graph access (Facebook) would do better in the long run.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#272
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this wasn't just an "insane" guy at the top who now left the company and everything's cool Satya Nadella has completely re-organized MS inside-and-out since taking the helm in 2014. It is a VERY different company than it was even 5 years ago. In March [1], Microsoft even went so far as to officially disband the Windows department and merge it into something called "Experiences & Devices". [1] https://www.theverge.c…

It's different, but not very different. They still have a lot of lock-in like Outlook (ActiveSync), DirectX, exFAT and so on and so forth. They show no sign of dropping lock-in, except in markets where they are way weaker than competition.

How is DirectX a lock-in? Vulcan/OpenGL are available. Using Outlook/ActiveSync is no more a lock-in than depending on GSuite (or ANY business productivity suite), and I fail to remotely even understand how exFAT is a problem. Weak arguments.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#273
post #87

these talks are actually not new. the same rumor appeared back in 2016 https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/07/github-is-raising-a-second... imho, github feels a bit too slow innovating, which is kinda surprising since they are still "a startup"

At this point I just hope that the acquisition goes through, is completely terrible and gitlab becomes the new standard.

I don’t know why you’d willingly be against competition though. GitLab makes GitHub better, but GitHub makes GitLab better. Why isn’t that a good thing?

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#274
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair they haven't screwed up LinkedIn. I think they will let GitHub grow with their resources.

Last I looked, Minecraft seemed to be quite in order as well.

It got more bloated... My kids still use an old version to avoid that (they only play with each other so they don't need the latest version that is required to play on most servers online)

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#275
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telemetry is bad, forced updates is not.

I saw one happening on a PC in a conference room two weeks ago at the very moment a talk should begin. Nobody could do anything with the pc until the update was over. Great user experience.

Fault from the admin I would say. Updates can be delayed or scheduled. I know that this won't help in the moment.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair they haven't screwed up LinkedIn. I think they will let GitHub grow with their resources.

How about Skype, though? People loved Skype so much, it was really a feat to make people hate it.

They wanted total control over the data so they converted the p2p supernodes to Microsoft servers... now the government can get what it needs more easily.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#277
post #193
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telemetry is bad, forced updates is not.

Forced updates are bad. 1. Updates can introduce breaking changes. 2. Windows will restart the computer to update, potentially interrupting processes. 3. Users should have freedom to use software in the way that they choose, and not have actions forced on them by the software. I understand that many windows users are far from power users and the forced updates provide security updates. My point of view is anyone will…

2. Can be delayed.

3. I agree. I don't give a shit about what users do to their machine, but when they launch a DDos to my servers, I blame them for not updateing their OS. In Windows XP history, there were many viruses/trojanes/whatever that were only possible because people didn't update.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#278

Microsoft has embraced Github with it's recent .Net core development, they are one of the largest contributors with some incredible cross platform dev tooling. C# is a pleasure and visual studio code is an excellent, extensible coding tool. Go forth Microsoft, the standard bashing in these communities is unjust.

I lived through the 90s, so I disagree. Anyone who feels perfectly comfortable with Microsoft's embracing of things they like is ignoring history. Maybe it's different this time, maybe it isn't.

A lot of the tooling is released under the MIT License. It's kind of hard to say they have ulterior motives when you get the right to fork and keep.

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#279
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forced updates are bad. 1. Updates can introduce breaking changes. 2. Windows will restart the computer to update, potentially interrupting processes. 3. Users should have freedom to use software in the way that they choose, and not have actions forced on them by the software. I understand that many windows users are far from power users and the forced updates provide security updates. My point of view is anyone will…

> I understand that many windows users are far from power users and the forced updates provide security updates I think this largely was only true of the period between the internet becoming a thing and the smartphone becoming a thing. Nowadays there's phones, tablets, and chromebooks that serve the needs of those people better and in a more convenient form factor. Desktops are for people who do work, create stuff, o…

Those devices only take you so far. They are consuming devices only, similar to a television. People still have and use normal PCs and will do so in the future. (Notebooks included of course)

Re: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has been changing a lot. Embracing linux in their cloud offering, offering unix as a subsystem on Windows, open sourcing their work. Anyone who likens the current MSFT to anything resembling what it was in the 90s hasn't been paying attention to the current leadership.

Windows 10's forced updates and telemetry say otherwise.

Microsoft is a big company, that's a different team with a different set of leadership. The guy in charge of Windows stepped away. Windows 10 is the last version of Windows basically. Not sure if that means someday they may release a distro (crazy I know) but it's interesting nonetheless.
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