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Microsoft Word became a valuable monopoly because it was a proprietary standard. But git hosting is a commodity service. There are already a number of players d

• zachrose 11y ago
  Except for all the things that Github builds on top of git to keep users coming back (wiki, issues, stars, etc.) which seem to be working.
  • cheald 11y ago
    The thing that GitHub has right now is the userbase - the network effect keeps people interested in their service. The technical value they provide is pretty trivially replicable (see: GitLab, BitBucket), but you can't code up a (real) community. It's worth noting that 10 years ago, this same statement was true of Sourceforge.
    • enahs-sf 11y ago
      I wonder what the sourceforge guys are making of this right now.
      • cozuya 11y ago
        Both of them are probably pretty upset.
    • colechristensen 11y ago
      gitlab and bitbucket aren't as good, I've tried them and more. GitHub isn't a commodity that excels only because of it happening to be popular. People choose GitHub because it's both popular and good. It has competition, some of which are better for specific circumstances, but as a whole they don't execute as well. Let me contrast with Facebook – it was only good, in my opinion, for a brief period starting in 2005 which happened to coincide with my freshman year of university. As it grew and changed, I found myself and very many of my peers hating each significant change. The only reason I've kept an account is because it's popular – it stores some weak social connections which would be otherwise lost.
      • timr 11y ago
        Horses for courses. Plenty of people prefer those other providers, just like plenty of people prefer one brand of toothpaste over another. Toothpaste is still a commodity product. I've never used gitlab, but I find bitbucket to be identical to github in every way that matters.
        • robotresearcher 11y ago
          And bitbucket has unlimited private repos for free compared to github's limited number for a fee. I moved my lab repos to bitbucket when we outgrew 10 private repos. It was going to be quite expensive to add more at GitHub. (Most of out repos are public but some things you want to keep private at first.)
      • joeyspn 11y ago
        Bitbucket is not as good? Feature-wise they're almost identical.... I use github for my FOSS projects and bitbucket for stuff that shouldn't be public, like for-profit soft and side-projects. If you don't see added value in free unlimited private repos that's not the case for many of us.
        • vidarh 11y ago
          I like Github best, but will readily admit it's mostly just because I'm most used to it. Like you I use both, with Bitbucket for my private stuff and Github for the public stuff. The latter mostly because that's where people are.
          • gfosco 11y ago
            I gladly pay for the Medium plan just for my own personal private usage. It's a wonder these services last as long as they do, when you guys don't want to support them.
            • vidarh 11y ago
              The point is the nature of git means I don't really need any of them. They're convenient as a public dumping ground (Github) or "backup" (Bitbucket) with a decent web ui, but if they disappeared it'd make very little practical difference for me (other than recruiters having to find me via another site).
    • dogma1138 11y ago
      GitHub's enterprise grade services and their integration with 3rd party and on-site solutions is currently above what anyone else provides. It's way above being a simple repository storage which isn't a trivial think to setup to begin with just watch the various talks from BitBucket's core team. As long as everyone else has to play catch up they will be fine. And i don't see sourceforge as being comparable unless you just look at a project hosting in it's most basic form in which Google Drive or Dropbox can also fit in that category.
      • cma 11y ago
        >in which Google Drive or Dropbox can also fit in that category Sourceforge offered shell access for SVN; Google drive and dropbox wouldn't support branching, merging etc. To say sourceforge is in a category closer to them than to github is ridiculous.
        • aikah 11y ago
          You could implement an app that follows the git protocol on top of Google drive or Dropbox 'filesystem'. In fact, that would be a pretty neat project.
    • dogma1138 11y ago
      GitHub's enterprise grade services and their integration with 3rd party and on-site solutions is currently above what anyone else provides. It's way above being a simple repository storage which isn't a trivial think to setup to begin with just watch the various talks from BitBucket's core team. As long as everyone else has to play catch up they will be fine. And i don't see sourceforge as being comparable unless you just look at a project hosting in it's most basic form in which Google Drive or Dropbox can also fit in that category.
  • timr 11y ago
    ...all of which are provided by all of the other git hosting providers. Again: these are commodity features.
    • mgkimsal 11y ago
      a diff I see missing from bitbucket is the visualization - heat graphs/maps of my activity on a project or across projects. I know it wasn't there early on, but I've known more than a few people that keep committing to a project on a daily basis because they can keep their streak going on the visual chart (on github). It's not really one particular feature, but a whole mess of little things that, collectively, will keep github 'default choice' for a lot of folks for a long time coming - it's inherently a bit more 'social'. That said, I'm in agreement with your view that most other services have most of the main same features anyway - I prefer bitbucket for my projects, but... I'm in a minority. This sort of feels like MS Office vs OpenOffice 15 years ago. Yeah, technically there's a lot of the same stuff, but there's enough 'missing' features from multiple users' perspectives that the larger player still 'wins'.
• nahname 11y ago
  There is no one doing "exactly what GitHub does". If you think hosting git repos is all they are about, you are completely missing out.
• blazespin 11y ago
  Agreed, the valuation makes no sense to me. There's really no switching costs that I see. Bitbucket is actually superior in many ways because of its tight integration with Atlassian - the real Microsoft Word of the Developer community. Sourceforge had this kind of play at one point and look at it now. Maybe they're going to start displaying ads for jobs for developers. Not sure that's worth 2B though...
  • mszyndel 11y ago
    Yet to meet a developer who's as excited about using Jira as about using Github issues...
    • toomuchtodo 11y ago
      I very strongly prefer, as an engineer, not to use Atlassian products (Jira, Hipchat, Bitbucket, etc).
      • findjashua 11y ago
        okay, i'll bite. My employer recently made the switch from Hipchat to Slack, and I can't really tell any difference in functionality. The only thing slack has is that it's pretty/shiny, which doesn't really make any difference to me personally. If anything, I miss being able to arrange the channels like I could in Hipchat. Also, what does Github give you over Gitlab?
        • toomuchtodo 11y ago
          My comment wasn't intended to make you bite. HipChat is playing catchup constantly with Slack (except the @here feature; Slack was behind the ball on that one). Slack's channel integrations are incredibly smooth. Message delivery is so much more reliable on Slack mobile than HipChat's app ever was (perhaps this was iOS specific?). Message management (stars, pinning, history links I can take from Slack and throw into Github issues, commits, or other SaaS team tools). The management of multiple teams in one interface on both mobile and mac desktop app (Slack handles this extremely well). Github issues are enough for me to stick with GH. It Just Works. So you don't have to provide me with Github, Slack, etc as an employer. But it'll effect my decision to work there. I've interviewed people at my previous job, and they have flat out decided not to join when they were told we weren't using Github and had no plans to move to it. When you're spending 8 hours (or more!) a day in tools, you expect them to be the best/easiest/most productive to use.
• Retric 11y ago
  Which is why Microsoft is worth 366.8B and GitHub was only valued at less than 1% of that. However, the name recognition that allows GitHub to charge a premium really is worth something, and I suspect they plan on leveraging that 250M to try and grow. In the end though it's not our money so we really don't have a lot of information on if it was a good bet or not. PS: For an off the wall example, they may be planning to become a seed incubator.
• dragonwriter 11y ago
  Git hosting is a commodity, but GitHub is a proprietary and increasing dominant solution with strong network effects that had git housing as a central element, but also includes several differentiating features on top of git hosting.
  • gavazzy 11y ago
    But the questions is: what are the specific differentiating features and will people always pay for them?
• sidi 11y ago
  From an employer's perspective, github profile has been one of the highest signal in our hiring decisions. Anecdotally, I have yet to see a gamed profile. This builds a very tight feedback loop, and ends up with more developers using github. And I don't see anything disrupting this loop for the time being.
  • timr 11y ago
    If you're hiring based on GitHub profiles, you're absolutely doing it wrong. I've seen plenty of total idiots with flashy GitHub profiles, and many -- if not all -- of the best coders I know have essentially nothing on GitHub. A GitHub profile page is a strong signal only that you have a GitHub account. Any other use is strictly off-label.
    • sidi 11y ago
      Punch cards, followers, stars on the repositories of the user, important contributions - all are available at a bird's eye view. You are missing the point if you just check whether the person HAS a github profile.
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
  • hessenwolf 11y ago
    I find this rather confusing. I have some chops, but I have nothing public in open source. I have always been employed to do what I do. Also, I am really not going to put something on github now... my time is really expensive (I'd have to apply for a budget internally of non-billable hours. It really is pretty expensive).
• hyperpallium 11y ago
  Yes, the network effect of social programming is the heart of open source, so the leader dominates more and more. But migrating issues is not so trivial. There are probably several other subtle points of incompatibility making switching a headache. If it ain't broke is the Enterprise mantra. They love to standardise. They will hang on for decades. However, the real point is that $20/m/user is comparatively cheap for the enterprise. The github category is already far better than the old ways; to win, they merely need be slightly more attractive and/or better known than the category alternatives.
• tomphoolery 11y ago
  GitHub still has the best UI for code hosting I've ever seen, and continues to improve their user experience in little bits throughout the year. The fact that open-source projects by and large have moved to GitHub now that SourceForge and Google Code are no longer reliable hosting options was probably the final nail in the coffin, although GitHub has been the major player in open-source code hosting for years in my opinion. But, you're probably correct in some way in saying that it's a "facebook for programmers"...it's relied on by companies to make hiring decisions, developers to find out what each other is up to, and projects to host their resources. GitHub is a great mixture between social media, infrastructure, and general workflow or development tools, and I think that's what has made it so valuable. I can't think of a better place to host my code.
• tomchristie 11y ago
  > There are already a number of players doing exactly what GitHub does There are folks delivering similar services, but nothing remotely of the same standard. > there isn't that much that ties a project to GitHub They don't need to have any stickyness if they continue to provide a service that's far superior to other's offerings. New entrants will find it incredibly difficult to break through at this point because of the immense investment that'd be needed to rival GitHub's service, and the lack of achieving significant user base and income during that process. > Something tells me that the "facebook for programmers" angle is essential to selling the dream here. The network aspect doesn't really need to be their main selling point. GitHub's value to development companies is dead simple: It's a more productive tool than anything else out there.
• bernardlunn 11y ago
  I think it makes sense. Enterprise saas is great (direct moentization) but cost of sale sucks. Viral growth plus direct monetization is holy grail.
• JimmaDaRustla 11y ago
  I was going to say exactly this - Word had very little competition, whereas GitHub has many equivalent competitors. I'm a fan of BitBucket - they allow free private repos, but the company as a whole offers multiple other enterprise solutions above and beyond what GitHub provides.
  • lojack 11y ago
    Word had massive amounts of competition. WordPerfect dominated the market well before Microsoft Word, was the biggest competitor for a long time, and still remains popular in niche applications. Lotus Word Pro, WordStar, StarOffice, and countless other lesser used products. Arguably, word processors are the one piece of software that probably has had the most competition throughout the years.
    • JimmaDaRustla 11y ago
      If that was true, where are they now? I remember some of these products as being wretched, and Word was our saviour, even with it's terrible formatting sometimes.
      • lojack 11y ago
        WordPerfect is still being used widely in the legal fields. StarOffice was open sourced and became OpenOffice and more recently has been forked into LibreOffice. Since we're now talking about more modern competition there's also Google Docs and iWork (for Mac only). All of these word processors are very widely used. Either way, you were making the claim that Microsoft Word had very little competition, while GitHub has overwhelming competition. This is very far from the truth. Microsoft Word has and has always had very healthy competition in much the same way that GitHub has plenty of competition. Like it or not, at this point in time GitHub is the golden standard, while the competition is riding in their coattails. Very similar to Microsoft Word.
• HyprMusic 11y ago
  I see GitHub's monopoly being in the services that integrate with it. We couldn't switch from GitHub even if we wanted to, not without finding alternatives to all the integrated services we use. That's too much friction for little gain.
• lojack 11y ago
  The analogy is closer to: Git ~ Text Editor GitHub ~ Microsoft Word Sure, git is a commodity service, just like text editors are a commodity product. It's trivially easy to migrate a Git repository to a different service, but quite a bit less trivial to migrate all of the issues, integrations, hooks, wikis, CI services, etc. When you look at the big picture, there are much fewer players doing exactly what GitHub does.
• deniszgonjanin 11y ago
  Except GitHub isn't selling Git hosting. Github is right now a central piece of infrastructure for a huge number of tech companies. Infrastructure-wise, so many pieces connect to GitHub. CI, deployment, bug tracking, releases, etc... Yes git hosting is commodity, but if you switch away from GitHub you have to switch so many other things as well. That takes time (hence money) and can be very disruptive to your infrastructure. So unless GitHub starts to suck while someone else comes up with a different awesome solution that solves most of it, GitHub it could be worth way more than $2B.
• bjourne 11y ago
  > There are already a number of players doing exactly what GitHub does, for less money, and it's trivially easy to migrate a repository away from GitHub to those other providers. What does "exactly" mean in this context? I've looked at competing code hosting sites and could find none that does exactly what GitHub does. For example GitHub very good search function which can quickly search through all commits, pull requests, tickets and wiki pages in a project in one go. It's a very useful feature no other code hosting site has. And that's just one of dozens of features (the repo branch visualization tool being another) that other sites doesn't have or doesn't do nearly as well as GitHub. In a way, back then, Gmail did "exactly" what Hotmail did.. But not really.