[sitkack]

> 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.

[irfn]

>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.

[autoexecdotbat]

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.

[az226]

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.

[sitkack]

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.