Equally, on their $200M revenue (or whatever it was), they would struggle to get a multiple that would be interesting for their VC backers. Their market cap at IPO wouldn't have been much more than $1B (absent some growth story).

It's a great problem to have, to be sure, but the MS purchase is a great deal for Github investors.

There's a lot of growth opportunities if you have >20m users.

Now that I’m a customer, it’s really ridiculous how badly their stuff is integrated. I mean, when I find myself wishing for the good old days of using Trac pre-1.0 because at least it fucking works and I don’t have to log in four times while working a ticket through code review and into a deployment. I mean Jesus Christ Atlassian, you're on version 6 and you can’t make SSO painless, and every time I type in a ticket number into an input field behaves differently.

Why hasn’t a competitor eaten their lunch yet?

If Github burnt a ton of cash to try and compete with Jira, ended up making a product that didn't attract enough people over at the same time as ignoring problems that users were already grumbling about, this could have led to them being in a worse state and easier for MS to pick up on the cheap.

Only recently did I discover you can download the CLI without installing XCode first. Saves about an hour off of setting up a new developer.

At first I thought the same way, but then I started wondering if those users are really meaningful users. Isn't most of the new developer products are either mobile apps or SaaS solutions, leaving aside monsters like adobe? If so, does it really matters that so many users are using windows if they consume apps mainly with their (probably, chrome) browser?

Windows is monetizing Telemetry data, which does have meaning and value, even for people that never leave chrome.

You can avoid using their software if you are concerned about your privacy, that's totally legitimate, You can also warn others about it, if you wish so and believe that it is an important cause. I'll walk most of that walk with you. But I believe you have no justification for your accusation.

This suggests it is used for advertisements.

In the grand scheme of things. No one cares about desktop development. Walk into a VCs office and tell them that you have the next great idea for a Windows app and watch how fast you get laughed out of the office.

How many developers are going to flock to writing Windows apps?

As much as I hate it, most of the popular desktop apps are written using cross platform toolkits like Electron. The only companies making serious money on the desktop are Microsoft and Adobe.

Games don't count as "desktop apps". They are mostly using cross platform game engines and not dependent on being part of the Windows desktop.

As far as IPOing, if they couldn't make money as a public company, they would have been an acquisition target either way.

In most of the world the "goal" isn't to go raise VC money. It's to develop a product and earn a living.

Maybe people building Windows apps for the massive market are doing okay without the desire to raise billions and take over the world?

This is an excellent overview from a developer point on why you don't want to develop desktop apps even if you don't want to depend on VC. This is 2009, mind you.

I said VC, but even as an architect of internal line of business enterprise apps, I would be kicked out of any managers office if I suggested developing a desktop app.

Heck these days it's hard to convince companies to write real native mobile apps instead of using one of the cross platform web based mobile app platforms.

Where are all of these companies that are making money selling Windows apps? Where all of the jobs for Windows desktop developers?

Again games don't count, they aren't for the most part developing "Windows apps" they are developing apps on top of game engines.

EDA software, CAD/CAM software, instrument control software, electronic simulation and modeling software, specialized compilers/IDEs, etc. are mostly made for Windows desktops (although more and more of them are also supporting Linux nowadays).

To put it into perspective King (maker of Candy Crush) - just one mobile app developer made $2 billion in revenue last year (https://www.statista.com/statistics/288974/king-annual-reven...)

That's about the same as Autodesk (https://www.statista.com/statistics/416235/net-revenue-of-au...).

Having a dominance in a platform (Windows) with a shrinking market is not a winning formula. Why do you think Microsoft is de-emphasizing Windows?

From no less than the CEO of Microsoft.

At our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more.

Yeah, I know about Steam on Linux, just a tiny drop of Steam on Windows.

There are many, many ecosystems where a Windows desktop app is the ideal platform. I spend my days writing libraries for Windows desktop software and sharing them with many other companies in the same space.

Almost by definition, most of the companies in any particular set of domains will not be household names you've heard of. There are really very few consumer software businesses, but somehow these unknown companies manage to be pretty damn profitable, even if they're not on the scope of Microsoft or Adobe.

I spent my first 12 years as a developer doing Windows development,cut my teeth on MFC,ATL, COM/DCOM, VB6 and later on Windows Forms with .Net.

But by mid 2008 the writing was on the wall and I had spent so much time at one company, I found that my skillset wasn't marketable. No one wanted "Windows desktop developers". They wanted web developers. I've spent last 10 years being a boring old corporate Enterprise Developer nowhere near Silicon Valley.

On my list of things that I'm focusing on these days - learning at least one modern front end web framework, learning Node JS (I'm mostly a C# developer now), become more proficient with AWS from the netops/developer/devops perspective (I'm slightly above average now), Docker, etc., Windows desktop development ranks right below learning COBOL.

Looking at the market for front end technology, why would any developer who wants to stay competitive choose to focus on Windows development over Web and mobile.

Windows development pays the bills, owns the tablets, laptops and desktop space outside US, and if that means being paid like COBOL consultants, even better.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/

Windows software development jobs have been in decline for years...

https://www.itwriting.com/blog/9121-stackoverflow-developer-...

I guess with 2 021 worldwide currently open positions on LinkedIn, there is something for many of us to be busy for many years.

Classic music also has been on the decline for centuries, yet composers still sell albums.

Working on technologies that are declining is not where most developers want to be....

Windows owns the desktop, laptops and tablets here in Europe.

Is it declining? Sure it is, consumers are no longer replacing their computers every two years, likewise with mobile phones and tablets.

Here the market speaks pre-paid, most consumers only replace their devices when they can no longer use them.

Devices around 100 euros are still being sold with Android 5.1 on them, maybe I should say Android is also declining, as it isn't profitable to spend development effort in new versions, given the adoption rate.

Android tablets are being replaced by Windows tablets across all major consumer chainstores.

All flagship Asus and Samsung tablets are Windows 10 now, that sounds pretty much desktop Windows to me.

I have seen countless technologies come and go.

Some want to be rich selling hit-Summer tunes, while others manage a comfortable life composing classic, jazz, medieval music.

The numbers I'm "throwing around" are from reputable publicly accessible sites - unless you don't think Stack Overflow is reputable. As far as the trend being away from Windows development - I posted a quote from the CEO of Microsoft in this very thread saying as much.

I don't "hate" Windows development. I would hate being stuck on unpopular, less marketable technologies. My area of expertise is still Windows back end development and ASP.Net MVC and .Net Core with a side of AWS netops, devops, and development.

Visual Studio Team Services is a joy to use for CI/CD.

I'm not disputing that Windows "owns the desktop" but the desktop market for developers is minuscule compared to web and mobile. All the money is going away from the desktop. How much money does the average consumer spend on desktop applications outside of Microsoft and Adobe? How much of B2B software as a service revenue is being spent on desktop applications compared to web applications and mobile? What are most people doing on their tablets if not MS Office and spending time on the web? Even if you're a developer, there is little money to be made creating development tools. My entire development tool chain consists of Fred Software besides the $11 a month a pay JetBrains.

Is it declining? Sure it is, consumers are no longer replacing their computers every two years, likewise with mobile phones and tablets.

We were talking about Software sells not hardware sells why are you conflating the two? As a developers selling software, The important metric is the installed based not the replacement rate. And you keep talking about the popularity of Windows desktops, but that doesn't matter as a software developer if no one is buying desktop software - except for MS Office. People are still mostly using thier desktop computers for office productivity and to go to websites.

I have seen countless technologies come and go

So have I, I got my start programming in 65C02 assembly language on an Apple //e. But I've never been one to mourn a technology that was passed its prime. That's the reason I've been moving away from the Microsoft stack toward cloud, web, and eventually mobile.

As far as where the money is for development....

Everyone including Microsoft sees the writing on the wall.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/selling-software-where-have-al...

https://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/22/mobile-game-revenue-to-pass-...

If you take games totally out of the equation, App Store profits drop substantially. Most third-party apps are games or native wrappers for web UIs (pinterest, spotify, netflix). Of those, most are free or tied to a subscription that's device independent.

The example given of Autodesk kind of proves my point. They have the same annual revenue making CAD software that King digital has making Candy Crush.

Games aren't tightly tied to a single mobile platform now - most of them use a cross platform game engine. The reason they won't go to the web is payments are frictionless on mobile and you don't have to trust anyone but the platform provider.

Today anyone can setup their own shopping site and probably manage their own shipping but most small merchants still sell on Amazon.

SAP can either be used as web based software and even thier "Windows" Software is mostly built using thier proprietary cross platform ABAP platform.

Another area where I see windows desktop software, and I don't see it goes anywhere soon, is in industrial, medical and labs equipment control.

Maybe no one in reality-distortion field of SV cares about Desktop, but offices are full of them and they're still running regular old desktop applications to do real work.

I have been developing mostly new WPF enterprise applications in the last 4 years and there is plenty of work across European business.

I'm not saying my experience is typical, but I suspect the bulk of enterprise apps are now browser rather than desktop based.

Another example is how across Europe, Windows 10 2-1 convertibles are basically wiping out Android tablets at consumer stores.

That has nothing to do with the statement that no one cares about Windows desktop development. All of the energy in the software space is web and mobile. Google wants to leverage the Android market - which dwarfs the install based of desktops to make Chrome OS more appealing. Apple just announced they are doing something similar - porting iOS frameworks to MacOS to make it easier for iOS developers to write Mac apps. No one would ever say that the Mac desktop market is vibrant.

Another example is how across Europe, Windows 10 2-1 convertibles are basically wiping out Android tablets at consumer stores.

Android tablets are horrible experiences. What are most people doing with thier desktop computers? Using the web and the same apps from the big companies - Microsoft and Adobe.

They paid software as a service companies for everything from project management, human resource related software, mobile device management, email, they had Office 365, etc.

Most new internal software is being written using web technologies. Even if they are hosting the apps themselves. They want thier employees to be able to access their bespoke apps remotely without logging into a Citrix Server.

Where are all of the mythical profitable companies making commercial desktop software? Where are all the companies making new internal line of business desktop software?

These systems are slow, unintuitive, and annoying. But they're stable. Companies don't want to risk their existence to change something that sort of works, so you'd be amazed at what a ERP solution with $X00,000 annual costs can get away with.

(In turn, they are often managed by / developed by the IBM/Oracle level of consulting b.s., which further drives up the costs.)

Isn't most of Oracle's desktop software written in Java and doesn't it run on anything that runs Java?

I thought that was addressed with this line:

>Windows remains an important platform in the enterprise and for gaming (although Steam, much to Microsoft’s chagrin, takes a good amount of the platform profit there), but the company has no platform presence in mobile, and is in second place in the cloud.

The 90% of users are largely enterprise (who don't go out and buy software on a whim) and Steam customers. Anecdotal, but the only reason I still have a personal Windows machine is to access my huge Steam library. I think a lot of gamers are in a similar situation. If my entire library worked on another platform (and all my preferred hardware), I would have very little reason to stay on Windows.

You may be drinking the kool-aid, but 90% of the market doesn't care. Windows costs $20 per device; ChromeOS has a non-zero cost either.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/09/pc-value-...

Look at the 4th chart down. That's a bit out of date, but current figures aren't going to be dramatically better, and look at the trend line.

So you're either missing the point where the margins on the laptops are already including the cost of the OEM OS priced at an even lower price than a personal OEM license, or you're missing the point where the OS being free also includes your annual usage of Google services.

During that time they can push on the software development tools/environment; and frankly they have always been better at that. Business logic is better done by business people and no matter how hard an average software developer is going to push against that - that's the truth.

Who do you think is going to acquire AirTable or alike? I could see Microsoft being incredibly interested in that opportunity.

If native apps, e.g. Office, really get replaced by web apps, it's going to be all over for Windows as a profit center, and Windows will be hamstrung by it's legacy customers from embracing simpler ideas.

Making it as an independent company generally involves not taking on more debt on top of a massive pile of debt.

What's necessary is, you know, profits and stuff.

2) Profits? You must be kidding. Take a look at some SaaS companies that have gone public in the last 5 years. Few are profitable. It's all about growth of revenue. The profits are way down the line.

Who's kidding? I doubt you genuinely believe we've reached a new paradigm where bankruptcy is no longer a thing.

But you were ostensibly addressing the idea of making it as an independent company - not whether and when revenues and profits might suddenly matter again.

We are officially well on our way to 1999 bubble territory! Nothing matters but revenue growth, even if you're selling dollars for 50 cents.

Maybe if there were VCs who would be happy to own part of the company and be satisfied with the dividends from Github's revenue, it'd be a different story.