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> It's fair to say that the personal accounts are irrelevant from a revenue perspective. Your assertion can only make sense if you also believe that a 12% paycut is irrelevant to your income.
12% of Github's income is ~0.001% of Microsoft's income.
A lot of people are concerned about the “what if they make me the product since I’m no longer paying.” A few reasons I don’t think that will happen: - private, single contributor repos tend to be pretty small. it costs Github very little to service a single account. - Github is a growing social network for developers. Getting young engineers on the platform for free will pay off handsomely when they join a team and a…
That's interesting to think about. Who knows, maybe GitHub will become the next LinkedIn for developers? Or for everyone? LinkedIn is nearly unusable these days, in my opinion.
A lot of people are concerned about the “what if they make me the product since I’m no longer paying.” A few reasons I don’t think that will happen: - private, single contributor repos tend to be pretty small. it costs Github very little to service a single account. - Github is a growing social network for developers. Getting young engineers on the platform for free will pay off handsomely when they join a team and a…
> Github is a growing social network for developers But in a social network I am the product
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> It's fair to say that the personal accounts are irrelevant from a revenue perspective. Your assertion can only make sense if you also believe that a 12% paycut is irrelevant to your income.
Revenue != income. It's quite likely the profit margin on developer accounts is lower than the other types, and if this cuts the knees out from under the competition may well be cheaper than, say, paying for advertising.
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12.5% is still a significant percent of revenue.
Significant... but the main threat to the other 87.5% is that developers try out Gitlab or other alternatives for their personal projects. These developers find that Gitlab is pretty good, and don't push their companies to pay for Github. Whereas if every developer starts out using Github exclusively for personal projects, it becomes the default choice when they start work. With this change, Github foregoes a little…
It turned out to be damned easy (and very cheap) and that's a serious threat to github's future growth because once people start to default elsewhere for one type of their work, it tends to drag along other types of their work.
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It sounds like recently they sorted things out, but Bitbucket's interface was buggy to the point of unusability for me. Some scary permission issues like not being removed from a corporate team.
Bitbucket’s website is slow as hell. I actually physically cringe when I have to do something through the website (e.g. create a pull request) because I know I’ll be staring at slow-loading pages for the next 5 minutes, even for something that’s 3 clicks away.
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If I’m reading the revenue chart correctly, 12.5 percent of their revenue was approximately 11 million dollars in 2016. At Microsoft, who is even going to notice that... There’s surely a goodwill factor and wider strategic benefits here beyond the relatively small amount of revenue - these individuals enjoying the free private repos will in many cases likely be future candidates for customers for the enterprise offer…
Comparing 12.5% revenues to a pay cut is not misleading at all. Unless there is some reason to believe that making individual accounts free will somehow also reduce costs in a material way. Seems to me it will likely increase costs significantly as many more users will flock to create free private repos. In fact, it's more like giving you a 12% percent pay cut and then asking you to commute further to work.
A decision like this has to be viewed in the wider context of Microsoft’s market strategy and the rest of their developer tool portfolio, of which Github is just one piece.
If Microsoft just cared about short term gains, there were much better ways to blow 8 billion dollars.