A lot has been said about Microsoft’s recent acquisition of GitHub. From the business analyst’s suggesting Microsoft over paid, to the developers fearing the Empire converted Luke to the Dark Side. To be fair, Microsoft’s track record has given developers reason to be concerned. I on the other hand, think this in context with more recent moves is what will make Microsoft good stewards of our code. Yes, I know that sounds backwards, but hear me out.
First and foremost, let’s be clear about exactly what Microsoft purchased here. For non-techies, Git is the underlying software that the company GitHub manages as a service. Developers use it to store and share the source code that powers their apps. The service is free, but developers can pay for more bells and whistles if they chose. There are dozens of companies doing exactly what GitHub does, they just happen to be the biggest and most successful one doing it. Microsoft itself implemented Git internally long before the acquisition, trusting their crown jewel Windows on it. So it’s not about the tech. At $300 million in annual revenue, the $7.5 billion price tag still seems pretty exorbitant.
What Microsoft really bought here was the network of 28 million engineers that use GitHub to manage their source code. If you do the math, they paid close to $270 per developer. In perspective; Facebook’s mammoth purchase of WhatsApp equated to $32 per user. Pat yourself on the back developers; Microsoft values your attention 8 times more than everyone else’s. A single license to their Visual Studio Pro developer software is $500, or $2,500/yr if you want to step up to their enterprise level SKU. Considering how lucrative a developer could be (more precisely, their employers), this price tag is starting to make a little more sense.
And that’s the obvious play here; Microsoft will use engineer's attention spans while using GitHub to sell them more services. And those Azure services are a damn fine product; they’re the reason for Microsoft’s massive comeback.
“But still Mason, why should I trust them?”
It was in the Ballmer era that Microsoft lost their way with developers. Microsoft thought they could strong armed with their dominant platform into using their less than superior tools and services. A short sighted strategy, no doubt. But consider a few cultural shifts under Satya:
VS Code. Compared to its expensive big brother Visual Studio, VS Code is a stripped down, lightweight, open source, modular, free text editor available on multiple platforms. It’s edged out NotePadd++ as the preferred text editor by developers in just 3 years (and believe me, developers can be adverse to change). This epitomizes Microsoft’s successful pivot to a new generation of developers.
Microsoft has started favoring the best tool, regardless of who makes it, even when it competes with their own. MS Teams, parts of office and a bunch of other recent cross platform apps were written in JavaScript libraries, rather than Microsoft’s own Xamarin. This is to say that Microsoft uses tools based on their merit, not their political convenience. The importance of this shift cannot be understated and should be praised by developers.
Finally, they’ve stopped Microsofting their acquisitions. Yes, you read that right. To purchase a successful company, only to mismanage the goodness out of it. But they seem to have bucked the trend. Mojang and LinkedIn are all recent acquisitions that have stayed pure, and got better with Microsoft’s resources. They’ve learned to let a good thing be, and it’s working well for them.
No doubt, Microsoft finds itself the under dog when it comes to developer favor these days. And they know it. If you're buying a car, who would you rather buy it from? The salesman who's fat and happy from a bumper month, or the guy who's had a lean one and sweetens the deal with free washes and oil changes? As the customer, I'll take the latter.