[arnvald]

I’ll never understand why they ruined GitHub. They had everything they needed - the one place in the world where 99% of open source projects were hosted, where all the discussions happened. A product that people were so used to that it was a no brainer when it came to hosting private repos. And they had to ruin it and give space to GitLab and other competitors. What a waste…

[jacquesm]

Because it's Microsoft. Categorically incapable of respecting their users.

What's interesting to me is how many people went like 'Oh, Satya really gets open source, this time it will be different'.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225599

[trueno]

always noticed way too much reverence for satya because of what he did to valuations. i personally cant stand azure/365/all of it. i reserve no reverence for satya, he's playing a game in a class/world none of us can even relate to so i don't even see the point in talking about his achievements. looking back, it unequivocally sucks that microsoft acquired github.

[sega_sai]

I am not sure it is that. The job of Microsoft is to satisfy shareholders. That is the only target. They only care about users to the extend that helps the shareholders.

[jacquesm]

This is how you'll end up destroying planet earth. Shareholders have to co-exist with the rest of us, if you wreck your environment to please yourself you'll be like that guy I knew in LA that had a Ferrari that he couldn't drive on the road just outside of his mansion because the roads were so bad. But on his private grounds he had clean blacktop and zero potholes...

[dvfjsdhgfv]

This is repeated ad nauseam, but do they really? Can you honestly say that Nadella's setting a hard target for conversion of local users into Microsoft ones caused their shares go up?

[DarkNova6]

In other words, the world beyond the next quarter does not exist.

[maronato]

Exactly. Which is why we must increase the social and economic cost of these bad decisions so much that it’ll be in the shareholders’ best interest to make the platform better to get us to stop. Precisely what happened here.

Just as with politics, the only way to get them to do what’s in our best interest is to make them come to the conclusion that they’ll risk losing money (or status or power) if they don’t.

[timacles]

The shareholders would certainly understand, destroying a key tool for undefined gains is not good for the shareholders.

What it is, is purely incompetence. Revolving door of executives forcing shit ideas because they need to assert control.

Big Tech has become a space led by lizard brained nepo babies who have nothing to contribute to the world, but think they're entitled to it all.

[stonogo]

Which shareholders are being satisified by the stock dropping seven percent in a month?

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

When Microsoft announced it was acquiring Github I submitted a comment about backing up repositiories locally. This idea got downvoted pretty quick

Did people honestly believe Microsoft is cool. I'm not so sure. The company has access to a large amount of surveillance data about computer users, it understands what it can and cannot get away with and actively manages its online reputation through whatever means necessary

Time will show the wiser

[giancarlostoro]

The worst part of Microsoft is whoever is running their marketing department, they just inject themselves into everything, like Windows. GitHub is different, they will 100% lose users and income if they don't learn to back the hell off of it though. Windows, well, everyone complains about Windows no matter what, so valid complaints are ignored.

With Office, well, your employer is paying for it, so you have no say in it anyway.

It's clearly the marketing dept at Microsoft swoops in and poisons all their software, who else would be doing this?

This is why I say, marketing driven development is garbage.

[alsetmusic]

> It's clearly the marketing dept at Microsoft swoops in and poisons all their software, who else would be doing this?

Capitalism (and it's demands of the market) at its finest.

[alsetmusic]

Stupid people think that because they're making a good living under capitalism (many on HN), it's a good system. All the ads on websites and shitty bosses and vendor lock-in and declining support options are "accidents" that would get better if "companies stopped being evil." No. It incentivizes evil.

Capitalism is the reason the internet sucks. If you don't agree, think about it longer and consider if it might actually be true.

[quantummagic]

Capitalism is the reason the Internet exists. Instead of just complaining, why don't you recommend an alternative. One that hasn't starved and murdered millions of people, such as communism. It's childish to denounce an entire system, with no bloody idea at all about what to do instead, except idealistic utopian dreams... like we'll all just get along and prosper, if only capitalism didn't exist.

[defrost]

> why don't you recommend an alternative.

Gee, I dunno, maybe state sponsored research?

  The people who invented the internet came from all over the world. They worked at places as varied as the French government-sponsored computer network Cyclades, England’s National Physical Laboratory, the University of Hawaii and Xerox. But the mothership was the US defense department’s lavishly funded research arm, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) – which later changed its name to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) – and its many contractors. Without Arpa, the internet wouldn’t exist.

~ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/15/how-the-i...

[quantummagic]

There may have been worldwide influences, but there is a reason it took hold and flourished in the United States, and other capitalist countries first. It all happened with capitalism in full swing, it was financed and built with the engine of capitalism driving it. It's disingenuous to pretend that capitalism is the problem and what is actually holding things back. It's childish and destructive. God pray we don't actually get to find out what these envious, spiteful people will spawn if they manage to destroy the system that has produced more wealth and prosperity than any other invented by man. They have no plan, or indeed any clue, what will arise out of the ashes.

[bitfilped]

No, publicly funded research is the reason the internet exists.

[account42]

The Internet was initially developed for the military and then extended for academic use. Capitalism wasn't needed to create it. And neither does "not the capitalism we have in the west today" equal to "soviet communism" - it's neither a binary distinction nor is it a one dimensional spectrum.

[alsetmusic]

It wouldn't have become the internet of today without capitalism. The government / military certainly didn't finance everything that happened after it was created.

[giancarlostoro]

You can be a capitalist without ruining your product.

[philipov]

Capitalism means ownership by investors, and it is the investors who ruin your product.

[recursive]

From my naive point of view, it's not clear from first principles why they must.

[philipov]

It's a version of the principal-agent problem, with the added wrinkle that principals have low barriers to exit. Both the management and investors share the incentive structure of a con artist.

[mindcrime]

Capitalism - in principle - doesn't even require that investors as such exist, much less that they own everything. That our current system has evolved into a pseudo-capitalist system which introduces all sorts of State created constructs (like corporations), and borrows elements from fascism, socialism, etc., doesn't mean that it must be this way.

[account42]

It does mean that in practice - even in the name, capital is front and center.

[monooso]

I believe capitalism is defined by private ownership (not necessarily by investors) of the means of production.

[account42]

Cool, but how is this theoretical fact relevant to the real world.

[jacquesm]

Investors don't run the company, they don't make product decisions on a day to day basis. They may demand growth and they may be able to fire the CEO if enough of them band together but that requires them to convince the board first (and if they can't then they may be able to fire some or even all of the board). Anyway, as long as none of that has happened I think this is an academic position at best.

[account42]

Not a very good capitalist though and there will be others without that "limitation" you have to compete against.

[petsfed]

Not to white-knight microsoft here, but I think the problem they run into with every product is that because of their ubiquity, they rapidly reach saturation with most every specialized product they sell. You cannot grow a business if your market is saturated, even if you're the only one selling. So they have to find a way to expand their market. With specialized tools, that's done by generalizing, right? And anyone who has ever driven a screw with a swiss-army knife can tell you, generalized tools never work as well as dedicated tools. Thus, Word ultimately sucks. Windows ultimately sucks. Github ultimately sucks. They are all of them trying to be everything for everyone, because the alternative is just mumbling along, being really good at being tools, but being really bad at conveying profit to their creators.

[cortesoft]

> You cannot grow a business if your market is saturated

At some point, a business should shift from growth state to a steady state. The idea that businesses have to grow forever is a sad consequence to how we fund companies.

The only thing that grows forever unchecked is cancer.

[RHSeeger]

> At some point, a business should shift from growth state to a steady state.

I was on a department-wide call; many, many years ago. The person talking was telling us how well we were doing and how we needed to grow. At the end, they asked if there were any questions (which, thinking back, seems odd given the size of the meeting, but.. it was a long time ago). I asked them "Why? Why do we need to grow? We're doing a good job at our core business. We're making money doing it. Why do we need to expand; specifically expand our offerings into something that _isn't_ our core".

My question didn't get answered. But it _is_ a valid one, imo.

[carefree-bob]

Businesses do not always need to grow at all, neither do investors as a class, demand that business keeps growing. A mature business generates a stream of dividends and everyone is happy. There are many, many such businesses.

One famous example is See's Candy, which Warren Buffet famously discussed in one of his newsletters. See's is a mature company with zero mandate to grow. It turns the profits over to Berkshire and Berkshire uses that to invest in other companies.

The economy as a whole keeps growing because human desires and ingenuity are unlimited. But a specific firm reaches its natural limit, at which point it turns into a cashflow machine to generate dividends for owners.

The problem you are facing is that Management does not want to acknowledge that it's time for them to start paying out dividends and leave growth alone, because that would be an admission that the profits of the firm are best invested by some other firm, and not by them.

It is all about management ego, in not recognizing their limitations, and then destroying the core company as they invest in areas where they can't compete. Shareholders and boards need to replace management when this happens, but it is hard to do because Management keeps insisting that they can earn an above average return if they keep the money rather than returning it to shareholders. And people love to hear stories of above average returns.

[ivell]

Can also be a tree. Growth does not mean customers have to be disrespected. It just happens to be an easy way out for companies.

[jacquesm]

Hah, thank you, that's exactly my sentiment.

[jacquesm]

If you can't grow your business then maybe you should just be satisfied with what you have. Growth without limit has a name: cancer.

[BobaFloutist]

>And anyone who has ever driven a screw with a swiss-army knife can tell you, generalized tools never work as well as dedicated tools

>Windows ultimately sucks

I actually want a generalized tool for my OS, a specialized OS sounds like a pain in the ass.

[petsfed]

Generalized in the sense of "this interface works as well on a tablet as a desktop computer", or "we can also generate ad revenue with this operating system" or "there should be constant invasive AI integration, even for users who don't want to and should not use such features, and who would pay a premium to avoid it if possible".

Not specialize in the sense of "here's your civil engineering operating system, which is different from your structural engineering operating system, and neither bear any similarity to your gaming operating system".

[Already__Taken]

Growth. It's a disease. Can't just work on a good product it's got to make arbitrary growth targets.

[hagbard_c]

This type of behaviour seems to be endemic within Microsoft. They're like the scorpion in the Russian tale of the scorpion and the frog, seemingly a retelling of the Persian tale of the scorpion and the tortoise:

A long time ago, a scorpion came to the edge of a great river. Not being a good swimmer, it asked a nearby frog if it might get a ride across.

The frog eyed the scorpion warily. “I’ve heard of your kind. I see the stinger you hide behind your back. I wish I could help you, but I cannot risk it.”

“Why would I sting you?” the scorpion reasoned. “If you die, we would both drown.”

The frog was convinced. It let the scorpion climb atop its back, then began to swim across the great river. But when they were halfway across, the scorpion suddenly stung the frog.

As the poison spread through his body, the frog cried out, “Why did you sting me? You have killed us both!”

The scorpion replied, “I couldn’t help it. It’s my nature.”

Microsoft just can't help it that they end up destroying the goodwill they inherit when they buy a property. It is in their nature.

[jacquesm]

You have cause and effect confused. They buy the property because of the goodwill, they can't get it any other way, they know they will destroy it but goodwill doesn't necessarily show up on the balance sheet, whereas the result of burning that goodwill will show up on the balance sheet.

[hagbard_c]

Well, no, in what way would I have this confused? I state they always manage to lose goodwill because it is in their nature to do things which alienate customers. I'm not saying anything about the why of it, just that they always do so.

[frogperson]

Product managers do not care about customers. They only care about their bonus and the line moving up.

[willis936]

I wonder which direction their line is moving.

[thiht]

> why they ruined GitHub

Are we living in the same world? GitHub is not ruined at all, it still works great (as in it’s completely usable), it’s still where 99% of open source projects are hosted, and it’s still a no brainer to use it for public or private repos (having used Gitlab extensively, GitHub is just so much more user friendly). There is more competition, which is good, but GitHub is still the default option for open source by a long margin

[hoherd]

I think maybe we're not living in the same world.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131406 "Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47487584 "GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45037365 "The GitHub website is slow on Safari"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861 "Why is GitHub UI getting slower?"

GH notification search doesn't search the title or description of the notifications. https://docs.github.com/en/subscriptions-and-notifications/r...

GH cannot search code that exists in non-default branches. Have fun responding to the next supply chain compromise in any org that has repos with multiple supported branches.

[thiht]

So some people say it feels slower, there's been some incidents recently, you're missing a few features and Zig moved out, that's it? Wow, ruined, completely unusable, I have no idea how I've been working 8 hours a day using Github in these conditions.

[paulhebert]

Ruined may be a strong word but it is much less usable than it was previously. Frequent outages, lots of weird bugs.

It no longer feels like a polished product.

[rawgabbit]

Based on Microsoft's past behavior, I foresee many companies outright banning developers from using GitHub. Especially now with multiple agents reading/writing against GitHub. It just takes one "bug" for Microsoft to ignore all privacy options and contracts it has signed, and instantaneously ingest every piece of code and intellectual property into its AI model.

[dec0dedab0de]

I'll never understand why anyone thought they wouldn't ruin it. It's a miracle it even exists anymore.

[naikrovek]

it's not ruined yet. it can recover, but it will require an immediate 180 degree turn on all changes they've made since acquisition.

microsoft, you suck at aquisitions.

stop shoehorning copilot into everything. holy hell, stop it. just stop. please. no customers ask for this. none. zero open source developers ask for anything like this, ever. stop it. stop. holy moly, stop. i mean it. but you won't stop because you don't understand why we don't want it, because you suck at acquisitions.

stop usurping github culture and replacing it with microsoft culture. you know what happens when microsoft culture arrives: all of the things that people love about your company vaporize almost immediately. you dorks don't understand this, though, because you suck at acquisitions, so this'll never change.

stop letting people with MBAs make decisions. this is the big one. people with MBAs know enough to be catastrophically dangerous, and they don't know enough to know if what they're doing will drive people away. MBAs lose all respect for customers and only see things in terms of value. MBAs do not see customers as valuable, they only see product as value. MBAs are insane. Fire the fucking MBAs and get some older engineers who do not have MBAs to assemble teams to help them pick product direction and product features. This is obvious to everyone except you dummies because you dummies suck at acquisitions.

you CAN keep the "GitHub" brand, and the clout, but you must stop doing everything you started doing since you acquired them. and I do mean that. you must let GitHub culture return. GitHub will die a slow, painful death if you do not. It will live on a bit longer as the git host of choice for some enterprises, but it will not last very long in that form. This is obvious to everyone except you because you suck at acquisitions.

you look at your shiny new pet and you grab it and you dash its head against the concrete wall until you see its eyes poking out and then you cry because it's dead, not understanding that it was you who killed it. you only wanted to make it better! but you didn't make it better, did you? you killed it. as you always do.

you strip everything that customers love out of these companies and you crush everything that the employees love about the companies with extreme efficiency because you don't fucking respect these things. you don't even know that you SHOULD respect these things, because knowing that requires that the MBAs be taken away from the acquisitions steering wheel and be permanently banned from the company. you are filled with cancerous MBA decision making and those MBAs will never admit it to you, because they are the engine behind these acquisitions you fucking suck at.

[lazide]

Everyone is just figuring out again why Microsoft was so hated in the 90’s.

[apple4ever]

Conversely GitLab was well positioned to take the space but then went and ruined their opportunity too.

[goku12]

The writing was on the wall when they tried to implement invasive telemetry on users, following an investment offer. They did walk back on it due to community backlash and boycott. But if history has shown us anything, corporate retreat happens only on account of loss of good will and brand value. Once the intent is established, they'll keep looking for other ways to satisfy it. The only difference between that incident and Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub is that the latter was a much louder signal about what was to follow.

[radlad]

How did they do this exactly?

[dismalaf]

This is just the way MS is and always has been. It was inevitable. It's part of their longstanding EEE strategy. Anyone who thought otherwise was fooling themselves.

[Andrex]

Embrace, Extend, Enshittify?

[stuaxo]

Big company isn't good at {thing} absorb company who is and apply all their know how to the part that does {thing} killing all the good parts in the process.

Happens almost every time.

[whalesalad]

Microsoft can't help themselves. They ruin everything that they touch.

[jmyeet]

This was inevitable once Microsoft wrote a check for $7.5 billion. You're not going to pay that much and not recoup your investment. You might say that they could've gotten it from existing income. Maybe that's true but it doesn't matter. Because you can get it faster by turning all the knobs to increase income and decrease costs.

Profit has a tendency to fall over time. A growing company can escape this for awhile by expanding their marketshare or expanding into new products. Eventually the only way to head this off is by raising prices and cutting costs.

Entshittification is fundamental to our system.

Consider this too: the people who are making decisions about Github's future have no investment in it's long term success. They're VPs, directors, managers and ICs who are simply trying to get promoted and get their bonuses by squeezing out short-term revenue. They'll be long gone before it all goes to shit.

It's almost like we have a distortion based on the workers' relationship to the means of production.

[not_your_vase]

GitHub was sold because it didn't make too much money. Microsoft bought it for OpenAI only, to train Copilot on the vast amount of code.

Of course, MS every once in a while says that it makes a lot of money, but they don't really say how much is costs to keep it up. Their free tiers are still very generous, even they are buggy as hell - I can't imagine that the profit it makes even dents MS' bottom line (assuming it's not in the red). But at the end of the day the model training is done.

I guess Github doesn't have a lot of use anymore, beside having a lot of users that you can use to experiment with such shenanigans to see what can you get away with.

[abeppu]

> Microsoft bought it for OpenAI only, to train Copilot on the vast amount of code.

I think this gets the timeline wrong. Microsoft acquired GH in 2018 and started the partnership with OpenAI in summer 2019.

I'm sure there was some strategy to extract value from it that wouldn't serve its users but I think OpenAI was not initially meant to be the beneficiary.

[not_your_vase]

Maybe MS just got extremely lucky, like winning-the-lottery-lucky.

But your timeline is off, however. Their partnership started in 2016[1]. In 2019 MS started to invest publicly in OpenAI - but by then they have had some history.

To me, this is at least suspicious. Granted, I have no hard proof.

[1]: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/11/15/advancing-ambiti...

[Insanity]

GH being bought by MSFT way precedes their OpenAI involvement IIRC. And I don’t think it was even needed to train their models given Anthropic does fine without owning GitHub.

So this logic doesn’t pass the smell test to me.

EDIT: seems there was only a year in between them buying GH (2018) and investing in OpenAI (2019). So _maybe_ they had that foresight.

[cute_boi]

Because Microslop always hires cheap labor that ends up becoming management, and then things start to break. And the cycle continues. This is what happened at Bank of America, Citi and others.

[andruby]

Ah, I think this is due to human nature. People came in and wanted to "do" something with GitHub. To give it their stamp, to help boost their career/ego.

[b00ty4breakfast]

the main pull of GitHub is not primarily git, which is easily done without an external provider. It's the bundle of all the little tools various other conveniences with git repositories, and how they're streamlined together into a workflow that many places are now beholden to. So they can afford to rough up the userbase a bit in the name of increased value extraction because so many paying customers are trapped in the GitHub ecosystem.

[thewhitetulip]

Some Product Manager who wanted his promotion of the year went with: Oh how about we squeeze more revenue from our unpaid users

[tartoran]

And what's even more disappointing is that despite failure they probably do get promoted.

[thewhitetulip]

Yes! And now Microsoft says Copilot is for entertainment purposes only

[dominotw]

nah blame goes to satya. not some rando who is acting on incentives.

can we please blaming randos.

[thewhitetulip]

Ultimately it's on the company culture. So yea kinda.

[lab14]

it's not that deep, once a company reaches a certain size it gets ridden with middle managers looking for their next promotion. middle managers are gonna middle-manage.

[shmerl]

Their goal was to have a captured audience. Once the audience is captured, of course enshittification will happen.