Comment by ken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ken | Hacker News Reader

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> GitHub will retain its product philosophy. We love GitHub because of the deep care and thoughtfulness that goes into every facet of the developer’s experience. I understand and respect this, and know that we will continue to build tasteful, snappy, polished tools that developers love.

> Ultimately, my job is to make GitHub better for you.

Whenever I see a product claim it's "for you", I cringe. You just can't put something on the web or on TV and say "for you" and have it mean anything useful.

What I always loved about GitHub was that it was the underdog, so they naturally built tools so that a couple of developers in a garage (well, cafe) could have access to the same type of tools that a Fortune-100 company has (and has to pay companies like IBM big bucks to install and maintain). It's using technology to help those with fewer resources, which is to me the entire purpose of technology.

Almost everything I've seen from GitHub in the past year or two has been to help enterprise developers at big established companies. Creating giant workflows and integrating with legacy systems and such. The little things that individuals use are slipping through the cracks. When I reported that the milestone date-picker went away for Safari users, for example, they just told me "Sorry".

"Developers" has become a dirty word. It's a weasel word that companies use to try to convince me they're talking about me, while actually talking about someone and something completely different. If you can't be more specific than that, you're almost certainly wasting my time.

I miss the GitHub whose homepage had logos of little startups I'd barely heard of, and direct links to new and interesting repos. Now they've got IBM and SAP and Walmart logos. It's clear that the "developers" they're targeting no longer includes me.

> Almost everything I've seen from GitHub in the past year or two has been to help enterprise developers at big established companies.

Companies eventually go after companies willing to spend money, otherwise they don’t survive because consumers and startups are cheap and don’t want to spend money on such productivity tools and services.

That or they could’ve shoved ads down your throat, or bundle spyware in the archives people download.

As they say, damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Next time when you like a service that brings you value, pay for it (using the royal you here).

I don’t think this is true. I paid for a personal GitHub plan for years to have the private repos and to support them, back when it was a simpler place. If 100k devs around the world did the same, they’d have enough plenty of money to do what they were doing then.

Instead they insisted on endless growth, hosting All The Projects without bound or limit and I’d say that’s what puts them in hot water, needing crazy amounts of money that individuals can’t provide.

OK! Let's work some numbers on this. 100k devs times $7mo personal account times twelve months. 100 000 * 7 * 12 = 8 400 000

$8.4 million in gross revenue a year. Out of this has to come all operational costs, all salaries, all benefits for staff, all other overhead, and so on. At west coast tech rates, that's low-30s number of people. Assume lower, since AWS and similar isn't exactly free. Do you think GitHub could have done every single thing they did at the time you have in mind with a double handful of engineers and sysadmins and managers? I must admit, I'm a little skeptical. Staffing a solid ops organization capable of 24/7 coverage takes at least a dozen people.

I haven't even touched on taxes.

Business plans can easily be a thousand a month or more. GitHub has an offering of $21 per user per month, also for business. In either case this almost certainly offers significantly greater overhead that the individual plans do. You can get the same revenue numbers with significantly lower load with a third the number of users! Not to mention that you have fewer customers for the same amount of revenue, which makes support higher-touch but much easier in important ways.

With this in mind, it's easy to see why a group like GitHub might want to consider investing in supporting businesses. There's so much more margin there. Especially when you consider that their predecessors did not, and GitHub out-competed them in part due to the extra revenue that comes from strong enterprise support.

Services like GitHub don't get to sit still. Or else we'd all still be using SourceForge.

The margin per user argument is fine but I’m lamenting that it leads to a sort of digital gentrification.

Personally, from GitHub, I didn’t want 9 9s or infinite bandwidth or feature creep or even to use it at my day job (Jira/Jenkins/prayer).

SourceForge is a scarecrow argument btw, it’s the MySpace of its sort.

I don't understand. In what way is GitHub's increasing focus on the customers that pay the bills forcing you out? I understand that you don't care about maximum uptime or SSO or the vulnerability detection system, but are they in some manner making it impossible for you to continue using GitHub? Or are you displeased because you feel GitHub could be paying attention to the needs of users like you, instead of big corporate users? Perhaps you feel it's grown Jira-grade complicated, and is no longer suitable for personal projects?

Sourceforge is exactly like MySpace! Sourceforge once ruled the roost. It was, for many people, the only game in town. It got complacent, and thought it could stay top dog while only really caring about the not-particularly-profitable users or if there was a good way to make more money from the services it offered.

Competitors innovated, found other business models, and did much better. Now we have GitHub! Which has learned from the missteps of Sourceforge. One of which was failing to invest in features that high-margin customers value and will happily pay extra for.

No one is forcing me out, and I still pay a subscription (kudos to GitHub for not raising the price over the years even if the exchange from my currency to USD has made it slightly more expensive)

My original comment was an argument that the reorientation towards business clients was not an inevitability as the parent comment said it was. this mindset says products for rational, aware individuals (here, developers) are not worth building anymore since the margins aren’t high enough. If these individuals aren’t worthwhile clients anymore than they are only data to be traded.

Thank you for for clarifying! It's nice to know that you're not being forced out of anywhere by digital gentrification.

There is a very reasonable point that this should be enough for any company not addicted to endless, pointless growth. This is, after all, the ideology of a cancer! Customers should be respected, rather than treated as data-generators fit only to be traded upon. You have made this point wisely and well.

I think it's worth considering why a business might consider limiting its investments in competing for a pool of low-margin customers of limited size. Historical examples suggest that confining your investments to just this customer pool will often end with your customers being attracted away to other providers who have the resources to produce a superior offering. As a result, what should be a healthy and sustainable mindset of building for rational, aware individual consumers can easily lead to being out-innovated and out-competed.

An intelligent reader will note at this point that there is a lot of uncertainty in the previous paragraph. This person is right! There is a great deal of uncertainty at hand, as with all things in markets. With that said, the above scenari is more likely than not, and the expected gains from chasing high-margin customers are generally larger than the expected gains of opting to focus exclusively on low-margin ones in the face of competition.

To such services as GitHub, the consumer offering is not a way to collect data to be monetized. Indeed, the experience for single consumers is critical - it shows the key features and accustoms users to the product. A high-quality offering for rational, aware individual consumers is of paramount importance because it is where the real customer funnel starts.

That's your side of the fence. Here's what the other side of the fence looks like:

The first job I had, I needed to get a visual studio licence of some specific level. It was a $2000 dollar licence or something. The bureaucracy of the organization I was in was large and slow.

My manager told me to request 4 licences instead of 1, so he wouldn't have to do the paperwork for the next set of interns. This wasn't an under the table thing, he told me this in front of /his/ manager, who obviously agreed that this was a sensible decision.

As another example, my current employers attitude towards s3 space usage is "eh, keep shoveling it in there, it's cheaper to let it grow indefinitely than pay you to make something that clears it out automatically. We'll let you know if it ever gets expensive.". I can't say I fault the logic.

Customers are certainly willing to pay money, but business services are where the gravy is at.

That’s fine but then it ends up like an Atlassian project, not something devs want to use for their next personal project.

And yes I’m familiar with expensive licenses, we have one which is $20k per physical dongle and it’s terrible.

I am a paying customer of GitHub. I'd gladly pay more than I do now, if it provided value to me.

As it is, they're moving in a direction that's getting worse for me over time, so "get all my (paid) stuff off GitHub" is on my to-do list.

If you're suggesting that every company that starts with consumer-oriented products must inevitably transition into enterprise-oriented products, I don't believe that to be true. I can think of many counterexamples.

Have to go where the money is, and if we're at the end of the business cycle where VCs are making it rain, startups aren't where the money is at. Businesses run on cash, not hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Think about that the next time you're on the free tier of a service you love and can't live without.

I never asked anyone to run a business on "hopes, dreams, and aspirations". I'm a paying GitHub customer. They could have raised prices on me and I'd still pay.

People used to say, "If you're not paying, you're the product", so I've been careful not to depend on any free-with-a-catch services. I guess now I have to be extra careful not to depend on any VC-funded services, either, because if I'm not as rich an income stream as the corporate world, I'm still not the real customer.

I commend you for paying. Seriously. People usually vote with their mouths, not their dollars.

With that said, tech capitalism is hard! Even if you pay, as you mention, you might still end up being left in a lurch.

I don't know what the solution is unless you build everything yourself, which is untenable, or ensure that providers you use are easy from when necessary.

I started paying for GitHub because it offered a service I want, not to support "tech capitalism". I'm still not convinced that capitalism is the right model for software. The GitHub situation is exactly what I'd feared.

When private fire departments fail to work well for citizens, we no longer just say "Well, fire department capitalism is hard!" It's the wrong model.

I don't disagree with your assertion, and am fully supportive of the non-profit utility model for Internet services (and donate to such existing causes accordingly).

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