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The world's largest code hosting company had a surprise turn of events this week when it was acquired by an unlikely partner: Microsoft. The news was rumored before last weekend, but on Monday morning, hours before Apple's WWDC, Microsoft announced it acquired GitHub for $7.5b in stock.
It's an acquisition that naturally has many concerned about the future of the service. Developers took to GitHub to express frustration, then a loud group took action, departing for GitLab.
Microsoft, however, isn't worried, and is doing a great job of appeasing wider concerns; it's publically cemented its plans to keep GitHub as a separate entity, with its own roadmap, and understands the weight of its investment:
"We recognize the responsibility we take on with this agreement. We are committed to being stewards of the GitHub community, which will retain its developer-first ethos, operate independently and remain an open platform."
If anything, the acquisition actually cements GitHub's destiny for the long haul. The company struggled to find a way to monetize the service in a meaningful enough way to deliver on its unicorn-sized valuation, even though enterprise sales were growing, at $300M annually, mostly from enterprise.
GitHub had been discussing an acquisition with Google as well, and had assumably evaluated an IPO as well, which would have been even more painful for the developer community.
Microsoft, out of everyone who could have acquired GitHub, is far from the company it was a decade ago. With a renewed focus on developers under new CEO Satya Nadella, it's made strides toward repairing those relationships by making many of its own tools open source, building one of the best code editing tools for free (Visual Studio Code) and even making the Windows development toolchain much more enjoyable to use.
I wrote more about the acquisition and what it means here, but my biggest takeaway is that GitHub and Microsoft combined is a force worth reckoning with: the company is building out one of the best end-to-end ecosystems to develop for, alongside its choice to focus the Windows platform on open-source web-based technology.
We're only in the infancy of Satya's Microsoft, but it's increasingly clear that the company is turning a new corner, and while we're only seeing the early fruit of that renewed focus, it's a breath of fresh air.
🌍 GitHub acquired by Microsoft
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