If Github ends up selling itself one day, Microsoft will be the buyer (2014) | Hacker News Reader

If Github ends up selling itself one day, Microsoft will be the buyer (2014)

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It's not prescience or genius..... almost no matter what happens, someone somewhere predicted it was going to happen. And with the Internet, it's on record so can be looked up.

Whenever there is a financial crisis, someone goes back and sees who predicted these exact circumstances, which of course someone did because that's statistics for you. But it doesn't make then a genius or prescient.

It just means they are the person who happened to guess what did actually happen. And I tell ya, it aint hard to predict which of the big companies will buy some other highly successful smaller company because there ain't that many acquisitive really big tech companies.

If you want to look like a genius in the future, Tweet a few predictions about random([amazon, google, microsoft]) will buy random([jetbrains, atlassian, twitter]). No one will notice if it never happens but when it does you can stand tall as a true crystal ball gazer who "really called it".

Here's when "The Simpsons" predicted the Trump Presidency. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXcYMvzZ7jk Same thing.

Here is when some other guy predicted - right here on HN - and way back in 2008 - that Google would buy github https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=262460 Now that guy is a genius! Oh wait now he wasn't, it was someone else who made a different guess.

And when those aliens arrive.... you'd better believe there will be a long queue of people lining up to take their title as "genius" and "prescient" and "called it".

linkedin employees say microsoft has largely left them alone since acquiring them, so i'm going to assume they will do the same thing with github.

What’s the point in buying it, then?

Is that rhetorical or do you really wonder?

Income?

But GitHub doesn't make a profit. They'd have to change it to make a profit.

I think the data. The thing about the linkedin acq that I always come back to is that MSFT now knows the technology stack of almost every company in the world. You can do a lot with this information including help guide strategic decisions like new products or new markets, etc.

The basecamp folks have always understood the "business" side of things just as much as coding/tech.

While it may seem prescient, the telltale signs screaming Microsoft always existed.

And if you're worried about GitHub's future, think back to Visual Studio code and how one of the most hated software companies in the world built one of the most love editors, open source none the less

> The basecamp folks have always understood the "business" side of things just as much as coding/tech.

Sure. "Facebook has been around for seven years. It has 500 million users. If you can’t figure out how to make money off half a billion people in seven years, I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’re unlikely to ever do." [1]

[1]: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33...

Fair enough, they're not a 100%. And to be honest, their assessment of FB is fairly accurate with the information they had at the time of publication.

FB is the exception, not the rule. Many social-local-mobile companies have come and gone burning billions of VC money without ever returning a cent to their investors.

Thing is, this was before Microsoft's whole momentum shift. Before they moved Windows to git, before they launched VS Code, etc.

That "momentum shift" didn't happen overnight. No doubt the shift was under way long before Nadella took the helm. Proper execution of the shift required a new leader -- that is to say, if Ballmer wanted to make the shift it wouldn't be credible while he was CEO.

Out of curiosity I did some googling.

This tweet was made on the day Steve Ballmer left Microsoft, right on the brink of the company's 180 in so many areas. Talk about calling it.

Here are HN predictions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Microsoft%20buy%20GitHub&sort=...

My understanding is that this is more or less how Gary Vaynerchuk sky-rocketed to the center of media through a similar(ish) comment about Facebook. Best of luck!

That and working 60hr a week for a decade or two.

Overnight success!

Absolutely but overnight successes tend to have that moment.

Very nice, with solid rationale and everything.

I hope that guy follows through his bet.

This makes me want to choose N medium-size startups and create 5^N Twitter accounts, one account for each possible tweet series of predicted acquisitions by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, or Microsoft.

At the end I’ll delete all the accounts but the one that was 100% accurate, and use it to start my own data science election wonk website.

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