It seems that Microsoft is buying Github for about 7.5 billion USD worth in their own stock.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Probably no reason to celebrate, but Microsoft under Nadella seems to run a totally different strategy than Microsoft under Steve Ballmer. Selling licenses of MS-Windows and MS-Office is probably still a good business, if done efficiently, but it cannot be the future of a company of the size of Microsoft. The dominating operating system is now Linux, mostly due to cell phones and tablets running Android, network devices and of course servers. The religious rejection of open source, as it was propagated by Steve Ballmer, is no longer visible. Some MS-Projects like C# and F# have in large parts or completely become open source and on the MS-Azure-platform virtual servers with Linux and PostgreSQL can be chosen, with the limitation that there seems to be a need to have an MS-Windows-box with dedicated software to manage the Azure cloud services. If we ask Richard Stallman this is probably all tactics to achieve bad goals by harming the free software movement. This can be true or not.
But we no longer have to automatically assume that this acquisition is bad. Most likely Github will continue to operate as it did before. Nadella will not shut down Github, while Ballmer might have done so, maybe. He would not have bought Github anyway for so much money. The real asset of Github as well as of LinkedIn and Skype for Microsoft might be the large collection of high quality identity data. Today Google and Facebook have identity data for about two thirds of the adult world population by my estimation. We see it in action when we find a „login with Google“ or „login with Facebook“ option for a web site. Yes, „login with Skype“, „login with Github“ and „login with LinkedIn“ would also be possible or even exist. This is the spot were these acquisitions might or might not be seriously negative. But increasing the pool of identity data makes a lot of sense for the new strategy of the company and I would assume that it was one of the major reasons for this acquisition of Github as well as Skype and LinkedIn before. Is it worth so much money? If the answer is quite obvious, we will probably know in the future.
Links
Links are in English or in German…
- Microsoft
- Github
- Microsoft’s Blog about the acquisition
- Github’s Blog about the acquisition
- Microsoft about the acquisition
- Heise
- youtube: Microsoft to buy Github… Here’s how they’ll destroy it
- Reddit: Stallman was right..
- NZZ (1)
- NZZ (2)
- The Verge
- zdnet
- ars technica
- Computerworld (CH)
- Techcrunch
- Microsoft’s open source software repositories on Github
- FAZ
- Golem (de)
- Zeit online
- t3n
- Microsoft stops Windows Mobile
- Linkedin will probably be bought by Microsoft
- Microsoft SQL Server will be available for Linux in 2017
- 2015-04-01: Microsoft dropping Windows-Support đ
- Microsoft laying off 18000 employees after announced loss
Just an interesting coincidence:
Microsoft has bought
– Hotmail
– LinkedIn
– Skype
– Github
These together have made Microsoft a major identity provider, maybe fifth after Google, Twitter, Facebook and Apple.
Since the future of Microsoft is probably not selling MS-Windows and MS-Office licenses, but offering cloud services, this makes a lot of sense….
Maybe worth writing an article someday…