[flagged]
I never spoke ill of Rui, i love him and supported him as best I could. Like I said, he's a genius and an amazing engineer.
I spent time trying to convince Google to pay for mold, as well as pushed other companies to it where i could, etc.
I'm actually pretty sad this business didn't work out (and that he left!).
In the end, whether someone works for Google or not i care less about than whether they are happy and able to do something they love. Work is work. If people are happy doing what Google has to do, awesome. If not, i want them to find somewhere they can be, whether self-employment or whatever.
Plenty of people leave to chase a different kind of happiness, and more power to them. I hope they all succeed, and try to help however I can.
Life is short, everyone deserves to be happy.
Beyond that, he's the one who wrote a critique of his idea, not me! I only pointed out that the conclusion i would draw is a little different than his.
Perhaps you should also consider that you don't know me, him, or our relationship, and that i may have a good idea how he will take what I write after working with him for years?
It does not. The comment is insightful and offers a business perspective.
> You should refrain from speaking ill of prior employees.
The comment did not speak ill of anyone. Quite the opposite:
> Rui is a genius and an amazing programmer
MS is not making money on dev tools, and roughly never has. They even say that in their reporting. What possible source of data are you using to say that MS is making money at devtools? The only way to do it would be to mix it with cloud stuff or services.
Github is the closest devtool thing that they get the most money from, and
1. It was never profitable prior to MS buying them.
2. MS does not report profit, only ARR. Which is small (1B). That suggests it is not profitable, and at the very least, not profitable to matter (it's revenue is <1% of MS revenue, it's profit is probably an order of magnitude smaller).
Heck - if you talk to the people there, they would tell you the same - for many years their dev tools headcount and budget was stable or declining because it is considered a cost center and not a profit center.
Github changed some of that but they are still not profitable, AFAIK.
Overall, this 'don't try to make money from tools' approach is intentional - as i said, the market is small and they know that. So they really don't try to make direct profit at dev tools anymore (at best, they try to get it to pay for itself), instead using it to generate indirect revenue.
There are a very small number of exceptions to this (attempts at enterprise revenue for github, which, again, are not succeeding yet).
VSCode is a very explicit recent example of this approach - they don't even charge for it.
The only reason they still charge for VS and subscriptions is to defray costs at all.
You are both making a lot of weird assertions with no data, and lots of attacks on people and things. This is not particularly helpful?
You don't need to critique his comment and I don't need to critique your comment. Yet here we are
> MS is doing fine with dev tools (VS Code, GitHub…)
GitHub has a revenue of about a billion. That's less than 0.5% of Microsoft's revenue. And like the comment pointed out, behemoths capture the bulk of the revenue. What exactly is he wrong about?
Note also he was a director, not the author's manager. That's a very different thing - he has a view of this as a strategic business decision, not as a personnel issue.
I think his perspective on that adds value in understanding why the idea can simultaneously be awesome in an internal context at one highly-instrumented company and hard to market outside of that context.
"Rui is a genius and an amazing programmer" validates the author's credentials for those who don't know Rui.