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Comment by guitarbill | Hacker News Reader

This "synergy" seems to be pretty one-sided. Which of these synergies is useful for existing GitHub users? That's kind of the problem with this acquisition, which is why few Github users are excited for it.

It also doesn't feel like Microsoft understands developers or even end users consistently. VSCode is a nice editor, but not the only one. The MSDN docs and site is awful. Azure is okay, but Windows 10 is somehow more annoying than macOS.

Meanwhile Github is in a tricky position, because for most people there's nothing but "community" keeping them on it. Github has some decent features, but nothing so great it would stop me from using their competitors. And they don't even have a CEO to provide the vision. The only thing in their favour is inertia.

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You answered it yourself. Github gets money to stay alive, and resources and leadership to actually start building again.

Is Github actually hurting for money? It has to be sitting athwart one of the most reliable rivers of gold amongst the independents.

Github loses 66mm on 98mm in revenue. They're hurting pretty bad.

Is it right to assume that this is because so much of their hosting is for free, open source projects?

And if so, then were open source to move toward GitLab with their even more permissive policies, how could they avoid the same fate?

I haven't seen all of their balance sheet but I'd guess most of their overhead is in salary, not in hosting.

Hosting is cheap, resources involved would be insignificant.

It's more about having too many people working on non-core products that don't deliver value. Gitlab seems to be doing fine and has built a full-featured CI system in the same time Github has only managed to add a basic project board and include commit messages in search.

Forgot to mention previously but GitLab is already on the same fate, waiting for an acquisition or IPO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17234167

Well, Github execs could do the responsible thing and cut costs. But that sounds hard, and like it would require effort, so here we go. It's sad.

> Which of these synergies is useful for existing GitHub users?

I would say the one that keeps Github alive. That's a pretty major one.

GitHub subscriptions included in msdn?

I was thinking part of Office 365 - collaborative dev tools are the missing piece for most businesses.

There wouldn't be a major need for Jira, GitLab, etc for the most part.

I don't know why this is downvoted.

I've worked at two major companies which both used MS Office/Skype for everything and a selfhosted gitlab for code repo.

If the MS package provided git, I'm sure we would be using that instead.

Probably only avaolable though MSDN , I would guess. When MSDN is extemded to cover Linux as well (not so far fetched with the Linux support in Windows and Visual Studio) this move would also make sense in a weird Microsoft kind of way.

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