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Comment by Touche | Hacker News Reader

If you're wondering why they bought GitHub, it's here:

> Second, we will accelerate enterprise developers’ use of GitHub, with our direct sales and partner channels and access to Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure and services.

This is it.

At one time Microsoft used to dominate enterprise software development in certain areas (most of the east coast in the U.S.) to such a degree that it was almost impossible to find a non-.NET developer job.

Their biggest failure was TFS. At one time all .NET shops used it. But then git crept in and the rest is history.

Microsoft is going to sell a lot of enterprise hosting accounts. Look for the on-premises installations to go through the roof, especially.

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> it was almost impossible to find a non-.NET developer job.

Mostly agree with the points, but I think it was always just as easy (if not easier) to find an enterprise Java based job than it was a .NET developer job.

> Their biggest failure was TFS. At one time all .NET shops used it. But then git crept in and the rest is history.

TFS certainly used to be a horrible product, and I still hate working with TFVC. But Visual Studio Online, their cloud version of TFS, really is a fantastic product, and even let's you host Git repos. The CI and CD features are extremely powerful too.

This is probably the most important reason. Microsoft is doubling down on cloud, and they are willing to do anything to get ahead in this game. This is the sole reason why stocks are going up for Microsoft.

Or they lock down the Enterprise version to Azure...

I don't think they will. They will most likely want to replace Team Foundation Server with GitHub Enterprise. There might not be a special AWS image anymore but a lot of developer teams rely on the on-premises variant of TFS.

Honestly, I hope not - over the years, TFS has turned from a turd into something good - Visual Studio Online, Microsoft's hosted version of TFS, really is a great product. It lets you use Git for source control and provides excellent backlog and CI/CD features - I don't often get evangelical about a product, but it really is a joy to use.

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