Re:Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks
by adventured on Friday June 01, 2018 @05:10PM
(#17210349)
Github is a niche product. Average people do not use it at all, its utility value is entirely niche. The average person will never know what Github is or what it does. It's useful to less than 2% of the US population, and less than 0.5% of the global population.
They've killed / destroyed / butchered large acquisitions before, yes.
Metaweb / Freebase cost them a reported $200-$300 million.
Feedburner cost them $100 million.
Slide.com cost them $228 million.
Motorola was a $12 billion disaster. They might as well have killed it.
DailyDeal cost them $114 million.
Wildfire Interactive cost them $450 million.
There are a couple dozen more in the $30m to $100m range.
Google Reader is the product that seems to leave the most bitterness, but that too seems to have been relatively niche.
Google killed Google Code in 2016 and moved much of their code base to Github. Maybe they'll rebrand Github back to "Code", but outright killing it seems unlikely.