A decision like this has to be viewed in the wider context of Microsoft’s market strategy and the rest of their developer tool portfolio, of which Github is just one piece.
If Microsoft just cared about short term gains, there were much better ways to blow 8 billion dollars.
It's misleading in the sense that a 12.5% pay cut is not something I can recover in other ways.
Meanwhile, there is a possibility that this 12.5% cut on individual account might be recovered automatically in other ways if it results in increased enterprise account.
My personal private repos have always been on BitBucket. Not because I like BitBucket more, but simply because of the additional cost.
Having unlimited private account on GitHub will encourage me to move my stuff there, and ultimately reduces the friction and increases the chance that at some time in the future I might be a paying enterprise customers.
It's misleading because it ignores user acquisition & conversion. Freemium often means you "take a paycut" on option A in order to make even more money on option B.
Yeah, I take that deal every day of the week.
Unless there is some reason to believe that making individual accounts free will somehow also reduce costs in a material way. Seems to me it will likely increase costs significantly as many more users will flock to create free private repos.
In fact, it's more like giving you a 12% percent pay cut and then asking you to commute further to work.