7 ms·

Great news for everyone bar startups competing with them as it looks like Microsoft is turning their multi-billion acquisition of GitHub into a loss leader to g

by mythz 7y ago

Great news for everyone bar startups competing with them as it looks like Microsoft is turning their multi-billion acquisition of GitHub into a loss leader to get as many devs using their platform as possible, no doubt to flex seamless integrations into Azure which looks like they're executing exceptionally well with their acquisitions & new feature giveaways. From the side-lines it looks like they're slowly becoming an unstoppable dominant force, what's surprising to me is AWS's / GCP's inaction, they're either asleep at the wheel or they don't see Microsoft's dev mindshare grab as a threat.

jdminhbg 7y ago
I'm not sure it's great news for those of us who are smaller users of Github. You would expect Github to concentrate even harder on enterprise users now that we're not paying anymore. I'm not complaining; MS should point GH at where the money is and there is competition you can switch to. I'm just not excited to save a few bucks a month given what will likely change.
- mythz 7y ago
  Unlikely, freemium users would make up the overwhelming majority which has been getting more value & less reasons to need a paid subscription with each release since their acquisition of which I've yet to see any signs of neglecting their existing user base. IMO Microsoft views GitHub's user base as potential Azure leads and Cloud computing as the current & future lucrative computing utilization business model who has been pulling out all stops to grow Azure as fast as possible. They're fortunately rich & big enough that they don't need every one of their business to maximize their profits and are more than happy to leverage the synergies in their different assets to funnel more business into Azure.
cjdu 7y ago
Agreed. I cannot believe that GCP and AWS are so asleep at the wheel either. If I were them I would literally be throwing money at some of the GitHub folks to have them fix AWS or GCP. And it was should have been rather obvious when GitHub released the beta of Actions a few years ago. Actions remains the most important thing GitHub has done, ever, in my opinion. It might take a few more years for people to fully realize what this could be. Hope GitHub doesn't screw it up!
- irrational 7y ago
  What is Actions?
  - Someone1234 7y ago
    Continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) services. Essentially when you merge a changeset you can configure a specific branch to automatically test, package, deploy, and integration test that branch with no additional human intervention.
    - Thaxll 7y ago
      AWS has that.
      - jlisam13 7y ago
        that's just a subset of the features you can develop with actions
    - irrational 7y ago
      So Actions is similar to Jenkins?
      - bastardoperator 7y ago
        minus the infrastructure, maintenance burden, and plugin hell
  - chocolatkey 7y ago
    https://github.com/features/actions https://github.com/features/actions
  - fingerprinter 7y ago
    Workflow automation w/ built in CI/CD, package management and code scanning etc. The most important bit is workflow automation. It can be triggered on most (all?) events github emits https://help.github.com/en/actions/reference/events-that-trigger-workflows https://help.github.com/en/actions/reference/events-that-tri... It was super obvious the value prop when it was HCL based. YAML based it kind of looks more like 'another CI'. It's still insanely powerful, just not as developer friendly anymore.
jedberg 7y ago
So far Microsoft isn’t taking customers away from AWS. They’re just expanding the total market. But I do wonder if AWS will try to buy gitlab.
- plange 7y ago
  Gitlab states it wants to go public this year https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/being-a-public-company/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/being-a-public-company/
  - jedberg 7y ago
    That doesn't preclude AWS (or anyone else) from trying to buy them. :) I don't know how much control their external board members have, but if an offer came in, the board may be able to force acceptance instead of going public.
  - yumraj 7y ago
    Even before, but moreso after this and the current economic climate, Gitlab is not going public. Even GitHub was never in a position to go public, that seems to be mere postering to drive valuation or attract M&A offers.
- oaiey 7y ago
  While Amazon tried to go into the private hosting and ci/cd market, they are not a dev tool company. Microsoft was born as one. When Amazon or Google would buy GitLab they would meaningless integrate it, reduce staff by half and then ruin it over time. Maybe when Microsoft would have opened up some years earlier, Codeplex would not share the fate of Google Cloud.
  - sdesol 7y ago
    > While Amazon tried to go into the private hosting and ci/cd market, they are not a dev tool company When did Amazon give up?
    - 7y ago
troughway 7y ago
Blazor is slow to start but I think long-term will be a game changer.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  You mean Microsoft's latest attempt at Web Forms/Silverlight, a product that yet again tries to muddy the separation between client and server execution contexts using magic. Seems like every generation re-invents this idea, and every time it fails for the same fatal flaw: Illusions are just that, and you'll wind up hacking around the illusion if you want to do something not envisioned (or run into a bug in the secret sauce). And before someone replies "it is nothing like Web Forms!!!" here's a direct quote from Blazor's homepage: > Blazor can run your client logic on the server. Client UI events are sent back to the server using SignalR - a real-time messaging framework. Once execution completes, the required UI changes are sent to the client and merged into the DOM. That's literally how Web Forms worked.
  - deburo 7y ago
    Well, it seems to be one mode anyway. Even in that mode, it seems more flexible and probably more efficient too, than Web Forms.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    There's nothing magic about it. Web Forms was a great innovation and brought the WinForms model to the web. It was more productive than anything else at the time and directly influenced MVC patterns (which asp.net itself went towards) and component-based UI. Blazor is the next evolution in client-side and offers an alternative to building component UI with C# running through WebAssembly instead of Javascript. Again it's much more productive and lets backend teams reuse much of the same code, similar to JS/node projects today. Blazor's server-side runtime is a optional model where all the component logic can run on the server and be delivered over a SignalR connection to further increase productivity and efficiency where it makes sense (highly constrained devices, local intranet apps, etc. There's even experimental projects to bring Blazor for mobile apps.
  - 7y ago
anderspitman 7y ago
As a counterpoint, alternative options like Gitlab and Gitea seem to be doing pretty well. I think the person who solves project discovery across all these services is going to make a killing.
adverbly 7y ago
> Great news for everyone Not true. The new Team plan will be a downgrade in specs from the old teams plan. For example it only includes 3000 Github Action minutes. The old plan included 10000. The next plan up would be > 2 * old price. Source: https://github.com/pricing https://github.com/pricing vs http://web.archive.org/web/20200406010552/https://github.com/pricing http://web.archive.org/web/20200406010552/https://github.com...
- danpalmer 7y ago
  You can buy extra build minutes. The missing 7k minutes would cost $56, which means teams with 12 or more devs who are using the full 10k minutes will be better off. Smaller teams using more than 10k will be worse off. It’s probably great news for the vast majority of teams.
  - Shank 7y ago
    This is only true if you're using exclusively Linux runners. If those same 7,000 minutes are on macOS, you're paying $560. On Windows, $112. At my company, we definitely use a mixture of all three for various things, so this will sting, with varying degrees, depending on how often we build new iOS, Mac, and Windows releases.
    - colinmcdonald22 7y ago
      Builds on macOS and Windows already depleted your minutes credit with a multiplier (Windows 2x, macOS 10x), so this shouldn't change anything https://help.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-billing-and-payments-on-github/about-billing-for-github-actions#about-billing-for-github-actions https://help.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-bi...

by mythz 7y ago

jdminhbg 7y ago

I'm not sure it's great news for those of us who are smaller users of Github. You would expect Github to concentrate even harder on enterprise users now that we're not paying anymore. I'm not complaining; MS should point GH at where the money is and there is competition you can switch to. I'm just not excited to save a few bucks a month given what will likely change.

mythz 7y ago
Unlikely, freemium users would make up the overwhelming majority which has been getting more value & less reasons to need a paid subscription with each release since their acquisition of which I've yet to see any signs of neglecting their existing user base. IMO Microsoft views GitHub's user base as potential Azure leads and Cloud computing as the current & future lucrative computing utilization business model who has been pulling out all stops to grow Azure as fast as possible. They're fortunately rich & big enough that they don't need every one of their business to maximize their profits and are more than happy to leverage the synergies in their different assets to funnel more business into Azure.

cjdu 7y ago

Agreed. I cannot believe that GCP and AWS are so asleep at the wheel either. If I were them I would literally be throwing money at some of the GitHub folks to have them fix AWS or GCP. And it was should have been rather obvious when GitHub released the beta of Actions a few years ago. Actions remains the most important thing GitHub has done, ever, in my opinion. It might take a few more years for people to fully realize what this could be. Hope GitHub doesn't screw it up!

irrational 7y ago
What is Actions?
- Someone1234 7y ago
  Continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) services. Essentially when you merge a changeset you can configure a specific branch to automatically test, package, deploy, and integration test that branch with no additional human intervention.
  - Thaxll 7y ago
    AWS has that.
    - jlisam13 7y ago
      that's just a subset of the features you can develop with actions
  - irrational 7y ago
    So Actions is similar to Jenkins?
    - bastardoperator 7y ago
      minus the infrastructure, maintenance burden, and plugin hell
- chocolatkey 7y ago
  https://github.com/features/actions https://github.com/features/actions
- fingerprinter 7y ago
  Workflow automation w/ built in CI/CD, package management and code scanning etc. The most important bit is workflow automation. It can be triggered on most (all?) events github emits https://help.github.com/en/actions/reference/events-that-trigger-workflows https://help.github.com/en/actions/reference/events-that-tri... It was super obvious the value prop when it was HCL based. YAML based it kind of looks more like 'another CI'. It's still insanely powerful, just not as developer friendly anymore.

jedberg 7y ago

So far Microsoft isn’t taking customers away from AWS. They’re just expanding the total market. But I do wonder if AWS will try to buy gitlab.

plange 7y ago
Gitlab states it wants to go public this year https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/being-a-public-company/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/being-a-public-company/
- jedberg 7y ago
  That doesn't preclude AWS (or anyone else) from trying to buy them. :) I don't know how much control their external board members have, but if an offer came in, the board may be able to force acceptance instead of going public.
- yumraj 7y ago
  Even before, but moreso after this and the current economic climate, Gitlab is not going public. Even GitHub was never in a position to go public, that seems to be mere postering to drive valuation or attract M&A offers.
oaiey 7y ago
While Amazon tried to go into the private hosting and ci/cd market, they are not a dev tool company. Microsoft was born as one. When Amazon or Google would buy GitLab they would meaningless integrate it, reduce staff by half and then ruin it over time. Maybe when Microsoft would have opened up some years earlier, Codeplex would not share the fate of Google Cloud.
- sdesol 7y ago
  > While Amazon tried to go into the private hosting and ci/cd market, they are not a dev tool company When did Amazon give up?
  - 7y ago

troughway 7y ago

Blazor is slow to start but I think long-term will be a game changer.

Someone1234 7y ago
You mean Microsoft's latest attempt at Web Forms/Silverlight, a product that yet again tries to muddy the separation between client and server execution contexts using magic. Seems like every generation re-invents this idea, and every time it fails for the same fatal flaw: Illusions are just that, and you'll wind up hacking around the illusion if you want to do something not envisioned (or run into a bug in the secret sauce). And before someone replies "it is nothing like Web Forms!!!" here's a direct quote from Blazor's homepage: > Blazor can run your client logic on the server. Client UI events are sent back to the server using SignalR - a real-time messaging framework. Once execution completes, the required UI changes are sent to the client and merged into the DOM. That's literally how Web Forms worked.
- deburo 7y ago
  Well, it seems to be one mode anyway. Even in that mode, it seems more flexible and probably more efficient too, than Web Forms.
- manigandham 7y ago
  There's nothing magic about it. Web Forms was a great innovation and brought the WinForms model to the web. It was more productive than anything else at the time and directly influenced MVC patterns (which asp.net itself went towards) and component-based UI. Blazor is the next evolution in client-side and offers an alternative to building component UI with C# running through WebAssembly instead of Javascript. Again it's much more productive and lets backend teams reuse much of the same code, similar to JS/node projects today. Blazor's server-side runtime is a optional model where all the component logic can run on the server and be delivered over a SignalR connection to further increase productivity and efficiency where it makes sense (highly constrained devices, local intranet apps, etc. There's even experimental projects to bring Blazor for mobile apps.
- 7y ago

anderspitman 7y ago

As a counterpoint, alternative options like Gitlab and Gitea seem to be doing pretty well. I think the person who solves project discovery across all these services is going to make a killing.

adverbly 7y ago

> Great news for everyone Not true. The new Team plan will be a downgrade in specs from the old teams plan. For example it only includes 3000 Github Action minutes. The old plan included 10000. The next plan up would be > 2 * old price. Source: https://github.com/pricing https://github.com/pricing vs http://web.archive.org/web/20200406010552/https://github.com/pricing http://web.archive.org/web/20200406010552/https://github.com...

danpalmer 7y ago
You can buy extra build minutes. The missing 7k minutes would cost $56, which means teams with 12 or more devs who are using the full 10k minutes will be better off. Smaller teams using more than 10k will be worse off. It’s probably great news for the vast majority of teams.
- Shank 7y ago
  This is only true if you're using exclusively Linux runners. If those same 7,000 minutes are on macOS, you're paying $560. On Windows, $112. At my company, we definitely use a mixture of all three for various things, so this will sting, with varying degrees, depending on how often we build new iOS, Mac, and Windows releases.
  - colinmcdonald22 7y ago
    Builds on macOS and Windows already depleted your minutes credit with a multiplier (Windows 2x, macOS 10x), so this shouldn't change anything https://help.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-billing-and-payments-on-github/about-billing-for-github-actions#about-billing-for-github-actions https://help.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-bi...