Once bitten, twice shy.

Moreover, although I agree Microsoft is making efforts to change [1], pro-Microsoft partisans make it clear much of this is due to the new CEO. What one CEO does, another can undo. GitHub's bus factor is now 1.

I would much rather have seen them go public. They were losing money, but not, last I saw, at a rate that was absurd for building a SaaS business. Is there some reason to think they couldn't have gotten into the black? And if so, is there some reason to think Microsoft will let them burn cash forever without getting anything valuable in return?

Previously, GitHub's success depended on GitHub serving their customers and users. Now it depends on the notions of some guy in Seattle. Some guy whose job is, at least by market cap, 99% focused on other things. It's reasonable for customers to worry about that.

I think the biggest thing suggesting they couldn't have gotten into the black is the fact that they had been looking for a CEO for 10 months and still hadn't found someone. I'm not entirely sure why they couldn't find anyone, perhaps they were just being picky, but it certainly didn't look good.

Or it could be that the board has been looking to sell the company for that period and nobody wanted to come on to be the CEO for 20 minutes before being replaced by somebody from the acquirer. Hard to say.

You're acting as if the opensource initiative in MS of late is down to Nadella and nothing else. It's much more a case of market forces changing and an acceptance of opensource within corporations.

That's certainly what I'm seeing from people. There are a ton of "it's fine because Nadella" comments out there. E.g.: https://twitter.com/kellabyte/status/1003660575690244096

If they are merely yielding to market forces, then that's not much of a comfort. Github was a leader in this, and Microsoft's customers have a strong bias toward followers and laggards.

> Once bitten, twice shy.

With Microsoft, the bites have been numerous and some are ongoing.

>What one CEO does, another can undo.

I completely agree with that as a general principle, and I don't disagree with anything you've said outside of this quote. But are you suggesting that Nadella is going to leave Microsoft anytime soon?

No, but he's not immortal. He could get hit by a bus tomorrow. The median CEO in the Fortune 500 lasts only 5 years or so, and he's already in year 4.

Probably want to adjust that metric for stock price ...

Buses are not big respecters of stock price, and what goes up can come down. Microsoft's numbers could get squishy for a number of reasons unrelated to open source efforts, and a revenue dip could either mean a new CEO or some quick cuts to things that aren't producing a lot of short-term profit.

GitHub's success as an ongoing concern was based on their investors willing to keep giving them more money or alternatively the public market giving them more money until they could become profitable.

We don't know how far they were from being profitable. But even unprofitability is not a big problem these days. E.g., Okta IPOed in the red with explicit plans to keep losing money for the foreseeable future.

Github was making over $200m/year, and was poised for strong growth in enterprises as they got with the times. I expect they could have gotten to GAAP profitability whenever they needed to. But they should have kept spending on growth to maximize market share.

How does being profitable and IPOing stop a company from being an acquisition target (see LinkedIn)? Just like the private investors could be swayed by a tempting acquisition offer so can public investors.

The only way that you guard against being an acquisition target is to remain private and not take money from outside investors.

Even with best intentions from both sides, acquisitions don't go well in a lot of cases.

It's quite common to have the following scheme:

1) nothing significant happens for 1 to 2 years, the big company slowly integrates the smaller one.

2) historical dev/ops starts to be tired of the heaviness of the processes and all the politics going on in the big organization. After 3 to 4 years, they start leaving, and knowledge begins slowly to get lost.

3) new features are slower to be pushed in production, often with major regressions.

4) after 5 years the service is becoming more and more unstable and/or is not evolving anymore.

5) after 7 to 10 years, the product is killed-off or put in limbo.

Yeah, but most of that happens whether or not your product is acquired or not. Acquisition may, and often does, accelerate the process, but almost every application eventually suffers from loss of focus, feature bloat, and changes within the industry. Those that don't tend to stagnate completely and get replaced when someone re-invents the wheel from the ground up with a few improvements. I mean, forget that happening to GitHub, that will probably happen to git in 10 years or so.

> MS is one of the biggest open source contributors nowadays.

Really? For its size? It seems like Google, Apple, and Facebook are all much more productive in OSS. The only open source Microsoft product I'm aware of using is VS Code. To my understanding, they haven't open sourced Edge, their JS engine, their compiler, their word processors, or really anything else of note. I guess I can give them a little credit for .NET Core, but would that even have happened of Mono hadn't existed?

> their JS engine

https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore

> their compiler

Microsoft makes half a dozen compilers, for as many languages:

https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell

The only one that I know of that is closed is C++.

> anything else of note

https://github.com/Microsoft/GVFS https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/16/microsoft-joins-the-linux-...

PowerShell is a pile of slightly incompatible versions, you end up with code targeting the oldest version you need (often version 2 for Windows 7).

I stand corrected, thanks! I still have a sense that they are rather less proportionately open source than those other companies, but less so than before.

Remember Skype? That wasn’t in 80-90s...

personally, I really like the performance of 'skype for business' but maybe I am in the minority there.

all of the tools and integration with outlook is pretty smooth...

"Skype" for business isn't even Skype code. It's Lync with a sticker slapped over the top.

Skype for Business is really, really bad on MacOS. Half of the time i'm trying to use it, messages don't get sent with an error message. Sometimes they do get sent but i still get an error message.

Skype on MacOS tends to get stuck in some loop that eats my CPU. So does MS Excel. MS Excel also had other, very annoying issues in the not so distant past.

Sure, as a MacOS user i'm maybe not that important to MSFT, but the quality of some of their products is surprisingly low.

The excel bit is likely because multi core support isn’t on Mac just yet. If you opt into their latest beta channel for updates, it gets way better.

No i had a different issue. I think it was after hard resets when excel goes "do you want me to restore the stuff i had open before?"

I would ignore this for a while (since plenty of other apps would also start up again) and then wonder what is eating my CPU. Surprise surprise, it's an Excel message box.

Well, then you won't be glad to know it's going away: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/25/16360072/microsoft-teams-...

Skype and performance are two words that don't ever belong in the same sentence.

You just gave a counter example ;)

"Skype has performance issues"

"Skype has abysmal performance"

"Performance in not Skype's priority"

I thought I would give some excellent examples of how to use "performance" with "Skype" - all of which are true!

It could have the word 'bad' somewhere in the middle.

but what if we don't use outlook - not everyone does. this is at the fundamental heart of the problem with Microsoft (Apple is just as guilty, btw). It is the "hey, we have a nice ecosystem - everyone should use it" viewpoint. As a developer and consultant - I will decide which tools are appropriate and best for the job at hand, not something dictated by corporate marketing. Skype has gotten much worse since Microsoft acquired them. Every time I start Skype I have to update it and its not as stable as it once was, especially on OSX

> I’m really surprised by all the Microsoft hate as if we were still in the 80-90’s.

You think the privacy nightmare of windows 10 happened in the 80's-90's?

And now Microsoft is going to solve all those problems? This'll be interesting to see how it plays out, but all of these issues are not confidence inspiring.