We Didn't Sell GitHub to Google | Hacker News Reader

We Didn't Sell GitHub to Google

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132 pointsbundie21 comments

> Not one high level person I spoke to during negotiations is still at Google today.

The whole Google culture and value has always been the same since Day one. And yet they somehow managed to convince majority of the public about how good they are for at least 10 - 15 years.

>Anecdotally, I'm not a huge fan of MS products (but no hater either), but Microsoft devs seem to love their work way more than Google devs, in my network.

That pretty much summarise the different between Microsoft and Google. The story is like Google's value and culture was founded upon the hatred of Microsoft. When Microsoft was supposed to be evil.

In the years Google rose, Microsoft was no longer evil. It did not last tho.

Microsoft was never evil, well not any more evil than any other company. Microsoft was a monopoly. Given what they get away with with Windows 10 and 11 one could argue they still are or at least still act like they are.

Microsoft is beyond evil. The stuff they do in third world countries is like cold war CIA lite.

In Argentina, Microsoft bribed their way into having power of police.

If you are a company here, any day you can get a email from Microsoft compelling you to provide them an inventory of your software under the pain of being raided by the police to get audited if you don’t comply, or you just may get raided if they suspect you are using illegitimate copies of their software.

Yes, Microsoft can kick down your door and check your computers.

We are a software shop in a small city in Argentina and at some point we made a blip in their radar because we won a technology exporter award of our city.

Our prize was an email from Microsoft like I described before.

They didn’t get a dime because all our desktops and servers were Linux, but they did try. They had the gall of pitching Microsoft Teams in their threatening emails. It was surreal.

Evil is malintent*capability so a company with monopoly over your entire hobby, profession and/or economy is going to score higher on evil even if a baby has more malintent.

Microsoft supplies software and services to organizations that run torture centers and concentration camps.

There is little wiggle room debate here.

Also Hanlon's razor

At its core, Microsoft is a business software company: they live and die by big businesses being willing to pay for their software and services. Meanwhile, google lives and dies by advertising. They’ve attempted to diversify into other revenue streams, but nothing else can compete.

I remember reading that Diane Greene, then CEO of GCP ,was keen to buy GitHub, but Sundar didn't see the point of owning it. Sundar's argument was supposedly, owning GitHub wouldn't improve the market share of GCP.

Yes, Google was part of the negotiations to purchase GitHub, but there wasn't full commitment for the alphabet CEO.

Sundar wasn’t even aware the deal was live. Greene had an infra background and didn’t understand GitHub or what made it special. If I had to guess, Google never formally made a Board-approved offer.

> Sundar wasn’t even aware the deal was live.

Because Sundar is a substitute teacher who is baby sitting Alphabet while the adults are away.

Defunkt makes it sound like it was a choice and they were a steward ... bs. If Google had a better offer, it would have been done.

Google not buying GH was a horribly foolish mistake. Mistake is the wrong word. Blunder? It has zero to do with the tech and everything to do with access to developers. I know how it played out, the Google folks were like, this is just hosted git, we could build that in a year if we wanted to. Completely ignoring that something like 20% of developers have an account there.

Almost nothing is a technology play, at acquisition time you are selling markets and audiences. I am amazed that GH hasn't capitalized more on the conveyor belt between GH and Azure.

>Defunkt makes it sound like it was a choice and they were a steward ... bs. If Google had a better offer, it would have been done.

Exactly! Total BS!

There are however some things that would motivate many founders to turn down their(Google) offers.

- Biggest issue with Google Acquisitions. They want the business and not the tech. They want to rewrite the tech riding their high horse. - They often wont offer full time roles to employees of acquired companies and would keep them on contract positions pending "interview" for full time.

I'll cry if/when Google buys some enterprise software I happen to support one more time. The appeal for a lot of niche enterprise software is responsive/knowledgeable tech support, willingness to implement feaure requests, and their ability to meet SLAs. All of these instantly drop to zero in a google buyout. Also there's no guarantee that the software will even exist in a usable way within a year.

I say this purely anecdotally, though, so take it as such. It has been a point of considerable personal frustration in the past. One instance was particularly painful because we had engaged the particular company looking for several custom features, and were basically buying a sizable percentage of the product they sold, with the promise that they would work with us implementing those features. When google bought them out, not only did the ability to get features implmented vanish, but so did the ones in flight.

That said, Microsoft’s plan on keeping GitHub independent and all the acceleration to make it a developer platform as opposed to just a VCS/SCM solution, with bets into CI/CD, security, and AI shows it would have been the better play than Google even if Google price matched. Google also had less to gain from the deal on a relative basis, so Microsoft could offer a higher price. Google would never have offered $10B for a $200M revenue company (at the time). It’s easy to forget that multiples were much smaller in 2018 than they were in 2021-2023. In fact GitHub was the largest enterprise software VC-backed acquisition ever at the time.

And a healthy dose of ex-post rationalization when you happened to be right.

You are totally wrong. Google had everything to gain by capturing the developer funnel from GH into GCP. It has nothing to do with 200M revenue. It has to do with mindshare about which cloud platform you are using.

They should have given CI/CD away, every commit a build and test run, just like Google internal. Start layering extra services, at zero cost.

It would have been half a percent of load compared to actual workloads running on GCP.

The title poorly conveys the tweet. "And people ask me why we didn't sell GitHub to Google. Seriously?" would be a little better.

I think the title likely have Why in the headline but HN automatically removes that. Normally the submitter would have to manually edit and add it back.

I hate that feature. I don't think it's possible to usefully solve clickbait with a trivial algorithm. HN already has robust tools for using human judgement to fix issues.

Hacker news edited the title.

This reputation can't be good and coming from someone like him is quite damning.

Google's rep for short lived projects and it's ecosystem. Are they even wanting to shake this perception or maybe it's a none issue for them?

Makes me nervous to dive into the Google ecosystem

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