Minecraft is a trick up their sleeve yet to be used. Manipulate and indoctrinate the youth.

Its had its fair share of outages and outrageous changes that overreach the bounds as well. Its more stable than github is but its had at least 2 sessions of downtime this year that I recall and they were both quite long (day length).

They'd lose a whole lot of users if they killed Java edition, since the modded community is so large. They'd quickly find one of the Minecraft clones reaching feature parity. And there's no good reason for it - it's not like Java is a threat anymore.

If I remember correctly UK players can no longer chat at all until they verify their ID.

They don’t enforce or even default to 2fa to change the account email. In addition, they have no process to get a human to reverse account takeovers. Just a web form that tells you to call a number that redirects you back to a web form

They've made it borderline impossible to log in, especially for children.

I just use an offline server, so I wouldn't notice if they had GitHub levels of availability.

I think they largely let mojang do its own thing, occasionally forcing them to make some dumb change that usually stays exclusive to their "bedrock edition". The mojang people capitulate since the original version and the one they actually develop for is largely untouched by microsofts decision making since the backlash for dumb decisions would lose infinitely more money than if they just let it continue to be a cash cow

I don't remember that happening so much (if ever) in, say, 2016. But the frequency of noticeable incidents seemingly has been rising steadily since around 2023. The Azure migration apparently only exacerbated it.

I think having a single 9 of uptime is a relatively new thing even for GH

It was not nearly as bad... I remember our company migrating to github.com, and believe it or not, it was significant performance/uptime benefit over our self-hosted instance.

(And the first thing to go was occasional 500's on github-hosted files.. the core service itself - git, PR, actions - were pretty stable until recently)

MSFT acquired Skype in 2011, so I would say only a few months:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=s...

Who was also the last CEO, right? Is this a coincidence?

And a ton of the top end ruby staff have left. Many of them ended up at shopify. There is a growing about of non ruby/rails code at github, but most of the system that people think of when they think github are ruby/rails.

Nat Friedman is a grifter who always shows up and says "I'm with these guys" when somebody or something is successful. I don't think that he was responsible for anything good.