Interesting, where are the financials for GitHub available? What sort of deficit were they running?

I think the answer would be 'a company without a history of ruining things one loved' -- my recent experience of Microsoft is very negative too (though I've seen some awesome tech demos of their's).

GitHub being unprofitable makes the situation worse because one knows then MS intend to make major changes: either to destroy it, or squeeze money from it.

Tell that to Youtube. Youtube has never made a dollar in profits. Did Google destroy it as soon as they acquired it in 2008?

No: Google is propping it up as a loss-leader and incentive to sweeten the deal by bundling their other more profitable services.

We can expect Microsoft to do the same thing: Github will still lose money, but it will integrate with VScode and Azure and OWA and they'll offer on-prem installations for enterprise customers who are already paying for those other profitable services.

> GitHub being unprofitable makes the situation worse because one knows then MS intend to make major changes: either to destroy it, or squeeze money from it.

GitHub no longer needs to directly turn a profit now that it is owned by Microsoft. They just need to use GitHub to increase their profits from Azure (or any of Microsoft's other money makers). I don't think they need to make drastic changes to GitHub for that to happen.

How do you envision them forcing^W encouraging use of Azure, or other MS paid offerings, through GitHub?

I can see that working if they don't meddle with GitHub for the next decade, and keep it running well; then people might be convinced to try MS's other offerings.

Maybe Heroku style "run this project on your own Azure instance now" (perhaps GitHub does this already?)? Is Azure's rep good enough to pull that off?

I haven't heard anyone say anything bad about Azure that can't be said about AWS, GCP, or whatever IBM calls their cloud hosting service.

That is exactly the kind of feature I think they will implement. They will probably add more support in Visual Studio and VSCode for GitHub as well, although their support is already pretty good as far as I know.

They can also throw paid GitHub features in with their Office 365 package, like they currently do with Skype. That would further consolidate companies on the Microsoft platform by ensuring that they don't have to leave it for code hosting.

What type of support could they "add"? They both already have excellent support for any git repo.

It would be great if companies like GitHub would figure out how to earn money. I love more diversity in companies and not just a handful of them dominating and being insanely profitable. The only good thing I see about acquisitions like this is that there will be a few employees with enough money to care less about their future and build something new and interesting. At MS, Google, FB, etc this will not happen.

It's not just about "earning money". It's about creating an exit strategy for the investors - meaning either going public or getting acquired.

Note: GitLab has also taken VC money (damnit!!)

In this world we live in, not being profitable does not equate to disappearing.

Also Microsoft is basically competing with the entire industry on some level, so I do not see how them buying Github could be a good thing.

So investors were going to keep sinking money into Github forever?

As far as competing with the entire industry, everyone competes with everyone and does business with everyone....

Netflix and Amazon Video compete but Netflix hosts its entire infrastructure on AWS.

Apple and Samsung compete, they are involved with lawsuits but Apple is still one of Samsung's largest customers.

Apple and Google compete but Google pays Apple $2 billion a year to be the default search provider on iOS. Apple also reportedly uses Google Cloud Platform for some of its iCloud hosting.

Amazon and Apple compete selling media and streaming boxes but Amazon Prime is on IOS devices.

Microsoft Azure and AWS compete but it is just as easy to deploy to AWS using VSTS as it is to Azure.

Microsoft and Google work together on Angular/Typescript.

Amazon hosts Windows VMs,SqlServer RDS instances and supports VS Code.

Atlassian?

If they could afford it they would kill it off in favor of Bitbucket (probably name it BitHub), stagnate development of services, lock it into Bamboo build envs.. Hating MS with a passion, i still prefer MS to have bought Github.

Atlassian is “only” worth $15B. GitHub was sold for $7.5B. Not sure Atlassian would want to effectively merge with GitHub since they certainly don’t have the cash to buy it.

I must ask, if it wasn't profitable on Sunday what changes today?

What's changed is that their new owner doesn't care.

Microsoft has a potent B2B sales org.

By combining GitHub's product with Microsoft's sales infrastructure, they can sell in ways that neither could do on their own.

You have a company with deep pockets that can fund it as ongoing concern.

Going concerns are profitable. MS don't look to me like a company that wants to charitably support Github's userbase?

The Xbox division wasn't profitable for years and neither was (is?) Bing.

It's not charity, it's a loss leader.

They have access to MS' enterprise sales and support pipeline.

> So which company would you rather buy Github?

None.

It could be run as a public utility or it could be turned into something federated to absorb the bulk of the hosting costs.

Only on HN / in San Francisco would the federal government (if I understand you correctly) be preferable to a technology company which has been a key player in the PC and internet marketplace for decades. I’m not trying to lionize M$, but come on - a Public Utility? As if the government doesn’t already burn enough cash....

> if I understand you correctly

You don't.

We are the public. If GitHub did an annual funding drive a-la wikipedia it would definitely keep them afloat.

A-propos, would you be OK with Microsoft buying Wikipedia?

Archive.org?

Having been to the GitHub offices and having dined at their in-office restaurant, and having gotten drunk at their free bar - the answer is an asbsolute no regarding me funding then via donation. I’ll continue to fund the Linux foundation, and continue to run my own git server, and continue to enjoy the fruits of VC funding, but donations for GitHub? Insanity. I would for sure be happier if they reached profitability on their own, but that was pretty clearly not in the cards.

As for Wikipedia, I feel similarly, except Wikimedia runs a fairly tight ship, and lacking a corporate product offering (or market) means I’m much more happy to donate. They don’t run in the deep red intentionally, which is the key difference. Also, GitHub is extremely easily replaceable (and we -need- diversity in code hosting for FOSS), whereas Wikipedia is not quite so replaceable, and diversity in open encyclopedia platforms doesn’t help anyone...

The owners of GitHub want their money back. Just keeping it afloat doesn't achieve that.

Investors would never accept that as an exit strategy.

That's a nice idea and all, but was there ever any path to accomplish it without asking everyone invested in GitHub to take an unforced L?

GitHub was a startup, and that comes with certain expectations and constraints on their future. But, for some crazy reason, avoiding GitHub wasn't a particularly popular position to take a week ago. People who understood the business realities of Facebook dunked on normal people for getting duped, then went around and complained that everyone should just submit to network effects and get on github.

> run as a public utility or it could be turned into something federated

hardly worth it for the investors who want to see a 10x or even 100x ROI for their initial private funding rounds.

Public utility should be started using public funds, for the public good. Private companies can never become this.

Honestly? Google.

For me, it's not about whose the bigger scarier influence, or who does more evil. It's just based on how practically I see either turning out.

=Microsoft Acquisition=

For a few months to a year, everything is mostly the same, until new features start happening. It starts with something like annotations on particular regions of code, with say all the annotations for the codebase stored in an extra file "git_annotations.tla", which is some zip file collecting together a bunch of random undocumented xml that changes constantly. These annotations are tracked semi-competently by VS Code and MS team enterprise tools, being updated to deal with source changes with each commit, but ultimately just showing up automagically in either the web view, VS Code, or associated enterprise tools. These annotations will start out as minor unimportant things, not even really worth porting to other editors, but will increasingly be abused for code review in enterprisey contexts. People who try to just edit things from the command line or their editor of choice will be constantly breaking other people's annotations at random times since they don't update that file, so file renamings, moving, etc won't be tracked properly. MS provides some xcode/sublime/atom plugins to provide partial support for some other editors, which prompts web developers to adopt them in droves so they can add gif tooltips to comments. At no point is there a great enough reason for anyone still using github to switch, so slowly the remaining open source projects there start making use of these features, and so contributers need to start using the appropriate MS tooling to ensure their commit doesn't break the annotations (or just use one of the supported editors).

=Google Acquisition=

Github user profiles are now linked to a google account. The webclient works better in chrome than other browsers. The webclient is renamed, rebranded and redesigned every 2-4 years by someone looking for a promotion, but ultimately in a way that doesn't affect people just using git from the command line. Github possibly gets a few additional features to support internal usage with Google weird mono-repo lifestyle. Google tries unsuccessfully multiple times to integrate Github into yet another failed team messaging platform or whatever, but again in ways that only affect the webclient. Google more successfully does some data analytics stuff based on searching and indexing all of that code now sitting on servers they own, and this is almost but not quite profitable, but close enough for them to leave it alone and get distracted by something else that's shiny.

To me, neither seems ideal, but all of the annoyance of the google stuff seems avoidable by just using separate accounts for separate things, as usual.

This is how I see things playing out as well. GitHub starting to behave like the MS Office suite is something straight out of a nightmare. I hope so much that we are wrong.