On Tue, Jun 5, 2018 at 10:53 AM, Charles Bedon <[email protected]> wrote:
> I don't think the problem is "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" anymore. You > don't spend 7.5 billions if you don't expect some serious ROI, so they will > try to monetize the platform as much as possible (which is totally > understandable). Microsoft don't have a good track record on improving the > products they buy. so they will either kill it after sometime if they don't > make enough money out of it, or Skypify/Linkedinfy it ad nauseam. Been > there, done that. > My bet is it's a "collecting underwear" thing - i.e. they know developers are important, and know there are lots of developers on Github, therefore it has to be good for something. Likely justified with several nefarious business plans that can't possibly work, like sticking a "Deploy to the Microsoft Cloud" button on every project whether that makes sense or not, and some mumbo jumbo of cross referencing LinkedIn and GitHub to make the ultimate developer social network, when then, simply has to be good for ... something. Honestly, when I think of Microsoft, I think of the immeasurable harm they did to progress in computing. There was going to be a PC on every desktop regardless. They just ensured that PC ran a horrifically flawed, vulnerable, broken by design OS. Convenient as it is, I think you can trace a big chunk of the rapid explosion of mobile computing to people using a non-windows device for the first time and thinking "OMG, you mean viruses, malware, ransomware, antivirus software that spies on you and blue screens of death aren't the way all computing *simply **is*? You mean that isn't *normal*?!" How much further along would pretty well *everything* be if millions hadn't been trapped in a world of 32 bits, synchronous I/O, backdoors, wide-open OS-wide configuration databases, never mind it being a black box, for an extra decade? So, no matter how warm and cuddly they appear now, there are a lot of career employees who have the "old Microsoft" baked into their bones. In the long run, I suspect Nadella will go the way of Jonathan Schwartz at Sun, and sharks will be back in charge one day, one way or another. I liked Jonathan, and he both cared about and was able to think holistically the broad ecosystem of software, but in the industry he's the laughingstock who gave away the farm. So, my prediction is one day Oracle buys Microsoft, hangs Satya Nadella from the yardarm as a warning to others, and a few months later GitHub gets shut down, not because it isn't making money by then, but simply because the person who shuts it down needs to do some gratuitous harm to someone to prove they're "Oracle tough" (that's a thing) enough to deserve a promotion. In the short term, though, Github will likely not get worse, so there's plenty of time to have a contingency plan in place. A GitHub monoculture was never a great idea anyway. -Tim
