Others have commented on why the acquisition makes strategic sense from a technological perspective, but I think it's also important to consider how it makes strategic sense from a psychological perspective. For a long time, devs loved bagging on Microsoft. I once saw some Microsoft guys demo something cool at a conference, and they had to basically apologize that they were from Microsoft, because dev sentiment toward the organization was so negative, even though they were doing cool stuff.
The acquisition of GitHub was absolutely intended to capture a tool/ecosystem that developers liked using and benefit from that positive sentiment. That's why Microsoft has been so cautious about branding GitHub as a Microsoft property out the gate. It's trying to ease devs into the idea that the company is something devs can like, and I wouldn't be surprised if this psychological strategy is at work with the npm acquisition, too.
>I once saw some Microsoft guys demo something cool at a conference, and they had to basically apologize that they were from Microsoft
Microsoft, "the people" were never bad. They did a lot of cool things, they had great coders and scientists. The upper management did bad things, and made poor decisions, guys like Ballmer and business strategists.
With the new management things changed a lot and I hope Microsoft will keep up at doing good things.
Not all things are rosy: desktop development with MS tools suck, they changed framework after framework, Windows Forms and WPF aren't cross platform, C++ desktop programming is still Windows only, and not Visual at all. I don't get why the naming: "Visual C++" since QT or C+= Builder are much more "Visual" than MFC and Winapi.
But I guess desktop doesn't bring MS too much money so they don't care enough about it. If that's the case, I don't get why they don't promote and support a third party, cross platform development framework like Uno or Avalonia.
> capture a tool/ecosystem that developers liked using and benefit from that positive sentiment
So...appeal to devs, something something, money??
I really like how MS are improving our tools and embracing open source, I really do. But I've never quite understood how the return on investment in these things justify the cost. I just struggle to the an obv big picture here.
I.e. is it incorrect to think of the GH acquisition as mostly an azure marketing expense?
I have a limited understanding of this but I think the goal is to have a complete developer ecosystem. When most software was deployed to Windows desktops, they owned the developer environment - Visual Studio.
Now most software is written and deployed on the cloud, but not their cloud. But they could make the dev experience compelling and easy - write your code in VS Code, which automaticallgy integrates with Github. Github is mostly free until you're a large company so why not use it. Of course you need to run CI and Github makes that easy so go ahead and add a single file to configure that.
Now you have a build artifact ready to deploy on github. Would you like to click a single button and have that deployed to Azure? They'll also throw in monitoring if you do it. Azure bills is the pot of gold at the end of the developer experience rainbow.
But this is just speculation. I don't understand business very well.
They can, and will have to continue to, thank MS legal for that bad rep..
While Upper Management has lessened some of their excesses, they still tend to be very aggressive in some area's, and time will tell which 1/2 of the company will win. The Open Collaboration group, or the "We want to control the world" group, there is still an internal struggle there
Many believe the "We love Open Collaboration" is just a facade and the "real Microsoft" will revel itself in a few years
I agree with this take. I'm primarily JavaScript/TypeScript developer, doing both front end and back end web app development. Microsoft being a good steward of TypeScript (and now the js ecosystem) inclines me to give C# and .NET Core a shot, and probably Azure down the line.
I for one appreciate that Microsoft is allowing these dev related acquisitions, such as Github, to maintain an individual brand image.
I can't think of anything worst if they decided to reskin/theme these brands to be all Microsoft-y.
Accruing positive sentiment in the dev community through acquisitions of someone else's nice things. Who came up with that crazy idea? GitHub isn't Microsoft. You can't buy brand loyalty.
Ah, but they can. The older folks will remember GitHub being a separate thing but as hundreds of thousands of new devs enter the ecosystem every year, they are introduced to a cool GitHub tool by Microsoft. They don’t know that it was separate nor the animosity towards MS.
You can’t change people’s minds on emotional baggage like this. You just wait for them to die off/retire and target the new blood.
Personally I've always found GitLab's design much more user friendly and the code and repository layout is much nicer than the spartan and cold GitHub.
About all Microsoft has dared to change (at least transparently) since obtaining GitHub has been the pricing page, and objectively speaking right now... it's a hot confusing mess.
A mascot featuring tentacles is all too fitting here. I don't know a lot about NPM or JS but it's being described as a dumpster fire which is also all too fitting. And I'm able smirk as I write that with no animosity or skin in the game.
You don't think google has telemetry on every file you open in google docs? Same problem - different ecosystem. In fact, you literally have to ask google for your file in order to view it in the first place.
Obviously yes, Google is scanning your Gmail emails and doing telemetry on every document you put into their services. That gets a decent amount of attention but it's no where near the amount of information Microsoft gets from you if you happen to be a Windows user. Google's search history on you would pale in comparison in terms of profiling, etc.
That's a pretty awful article from the age of "putting windows 10 and spying in the title generates easy clicks".
The quoted statement had nothing to do with Windows 10 and was specifically do with Microsoft's digital services like Hotmail & OneDrive, which the statement has now been updated to clarify:
"Finally, we will retain, access, transfer, disclose, and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails in Outlook.com, or files in private folders on OneDrive), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to do any of the following:"
Microsoft doesn't care about your local files, but you agree with the generic "to comply with laws and protect our systems" statement if you decide to use their cloud services.
I think I posted that pretty ironically and with enough glib not to be taken too seriously. Oh well. To say their not profiling users using their OS is insane. Private repositories can't even be encrypted on GitHub. What another absolutely insane joke.
The acquisition of GitHub was absolutely intended to capture a tool/ecosystem that developers liked using and benefit from that positive sentiment. That's why Microsoft has been so cautious about branding GitHub as a Microsoft property out the gate. It's trying to ease devs into the idea that the company is something devs can like, and I wouldn't be surprised if this psychological strategy is at work with the npm acquisition, too.