https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Then again one of the main reasons people start companies like Instagram and Waze is so they can be bought by these giants.
I don't know if a regulator would have had the foresight to see Instagram, which was still as much known for its filters as its social network as anything but a compliment? Look at how Instagram was seen as one of many similar products at the time:
https://www.engadget.com/2012/05/25/instacrt-puts-all-other-...
https://lifehacker.com/5970648/five-best-photo-filter-apps
An early rival, Hipstamatic, was named the Apple App of the Year in 2010: https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/09/apple-top-apps-2010/
Insta has taken on a life of its own over the last 2-3 years, but if they had chose to go their own way, whose to say Facebook wouldn't have clobbered them, in much the way they nuked Foursquare.
I'm not opposed to regulation, per se, but we should also be careful not to indulge in revisionist history.
On another plan (not really related to the argument- but more as to what really made IG stand out), when almost identical services as you mentioned are similarly growing, the only difference is the endorsement behind closed doors. Instagram was endorsed by Adam D'angelo, Jack dorsey and Sequoia w $50M in its war chest
Also, FB itself wasn’t what it is now at the time either.
This information asymmetry is a big issue. It means big platforms can detect competitors early and know when to offer generous acquisition deals to neutralise them. The people working in these competitors don't have this comparative basis to tell how well they're doing.
As a small player, it's very hard to see how successful your competitors are. For example, Google and Apple only provide vague statistics about number of downloads in their appstores, rounded very loosely. But they internally can track detailed metrics. Facebook and Twitter are used as distribution mechanisms, for login, and as sources of contact info. They can glean insights from that.
Facebook has even better insights through the Onavo VPN, which as it tunnels traffic from other apps, can even show which features are doing well https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/12/facebook-starts-pushing-it...
What do you think Microsoft would do to harm Github? I doubt it would be as bad as what became of SourceForge.
Lay off employees until they're profitable.
Tech companies tend to invest ahead of growth, because tech markets tend to be winner-take-all and if the market grows when you don't, somebody else will take the market. They're effectively using their employees as insurance to make sure nobody else can catch them in the market.
As a result, they often have orders of magnitude more employees than is necessary to keep the lights on, the product operational, and the money flowing in (at least in the short term). Google, for example, really just needs datacenter ops technicians and SREs to keep the product up, which is maybe 2% of their current headcount. If they laid everyone else off, they'd eventually become vulnerable to a competitor or lawsuit or public opinion or unhappy/indifferent customers. But until that happened, they could maintain quite hefty profits.
I don't have a stake in Github. I am a user with 2 distinct roles. In one role, I work for a company that pays for Github's services. Github has done a very good job hiring people who have maintained the service as it scaled to very high levels. I am concerned that Microsoft will be unable or even unwilling to keep those teams intact. They may wish to restructure the organisation. They may wish to change middle management in an attempt to make it profitable, etc, etc. Github has had a good track record with us. Organisationally we have no experience with Microsoft, so it's a risk.
Personally, I spent a chunk of my career working in the MS world (working with gold/platinum level partners). This is ancient history by now (10 years ago), but my experience with MS support was abysmal. Essentially "support" amounted to having a telephone number where I could report issues. No follow up allowed. No notification if the issue was ever resolved. Upgrade to the next version when it comes out and check for yourself to see if it has been fixed. Hey, that's why we pay for those MSDN subscriptions! Though, if you have about 1000 seats in your license, you can get real support (if you are lucky). Maybe that's all changed and they are fantastic, but once bitten twice shy as they say.
In my other role as a consumer with Github, I have my personal repositories there. I still vividly remember MS's push to create a division between "hobbyists" and "professional developers". The idea was to provide different levels of access based on the idea that "professional developers" work for large companies that will pay for high licensing fees and extensive support contracts (which only really seem to count if you have at least 1000 seats... see above). "Hobbyists" are intentionally crippled by giving them just enough access to seem like they can do something, but denying them crucial things.
With the release of VSCode, etc, I can see that the company has changed, but old ideas die hard. 10 or 15 years is not enough time for me to feel like I can trust the company. Will they slowly screw me over by using their dominant position to "boil the frog" -- slowly crippling their "hobbyists" without ever doing anything overt enough to cause them to jump out of the pot? Only time will tell, but yes I'm quite concerned. To be fair, MS is not the only potential purchaser who would concern me. At least it isn't Oracle!
GVFS. I believe Github will only deploy to Microsoft's GVFS sometime after acquisition. This is one of the more obvious plans, I thought shrug
Keep the money moving.
From another Economist article ("How to Tame the Tech Titans", https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/01/18/how-to-tame-the...):
> Two broad changes of thinking would go a long way towards sensibly taming the titans. The first is to make better use of existing competition law. Trustbusters should scrutinise mergers to gauge whether a deal is likely to neutralise a potential long-term threat, even if the target is small at the time. Such scrutiny might have prevented Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and Google’s of Waze, which makes navigation software. To ensure that the platforms do not favour their own products, oversight groups could be set up to deliberate on complaints from rivals—a bit like the independent “technical committee” created by the antitrust case against Microsoft in 2001. Immunity to content liability must go, too.
> Second, trustbusters need to think afresh about how tech markets work. A central insight, one increasingly discussed among economists and regulators, is that personal data are the currency in which customers actually buy services. Through that prism, the tech titans receive valuable information—on their users’ behaviour, friends and purchasing habits—in return for their products. Just as America drew up sophisticated rules about intellectual property in the 19th century, so it needs a new set of laws to govern the ownership and exchange of data, with the aim of giving solid rights to individuals.