Microsoft seems to have bought Github. Is that a reason to celebrate or despair? I'm not entirely sure yet.
Github has become such an essential place for my work. All my personal repos and our Kirby repos are hosted on Github. We handle all Kirby tickets and the development process for the next version here and I don't know where we would move to, if it stopped to exist or stopped to be great. Bitbucket? Gitlab?
But Microsoft isn't the Microsoft from a couple years ago anymore. I hardly remember any company that positively turned around their image so quickly over such a short period of time. From Steve Ballmer's "Developers, Developers Developers" cringe-fest, to a quite charismatic Nadella. From the nightmarish IE-days to the almost really good Edge. From Clippy to an incredible design vision for hardware and sometimes even for software (can you imagine?)
But more than that, Microsoft is obviously heavily invested in becoming the new BFF for developers.
- They are pumping lots of resources into VS Code, if you follow the development of the editor. It's an incredible tool and I really love to work with it.
- They hired some of the most well-known names in the web industry in the last years.
- I see them sponsoring a lot of tech conferences lately.
- Azure seems to be a very decent competitor to AWS.
- They seem heavily invested in their machine learning platforms and all that buzzwordy new "serverless" stuff.
- They brought Linux to Windows
- They now bought Github
That's quite a list! Probably not even complete.
This is not supposed to be a Microsoft endorsement. I'm still very sceptical about the future of Github. It could go the way of Skype .....
I have no idea what their plans are. But it's very interesting for me to get a glimpse of a pretty huge strategy — at least it seems so.
Microsoft seems to really embrace the web as the next app platform. Way more holistic than just the "cloud" part, but as a full circle of all the backend stuff, PWAs on Windows, the developer tools and Electron as a direct link between the web and as a possible way to get a foot in the door of other operating systems.
I personally have replaced quite a few native apps with web apps over the last two years and I wouldn't want to go back. I even go so far that I'd love to have something like a ChromeBook some day (just not from Google. I want a Surface Web Book!). This is not going to work for all use cases, but with modern browser capabilities, we are definitely not very far away from that.
For most developers I know, macOS has been the platform of choice to develop for the web for years. Besides the Unix base, the main reason has always been the landscape of incredibly well-built third-party apps and tools. But Apple has obviously lost any focus on their pro users and on macOS as a platform. I don't see iOS replacing it anytime soon as a professional developer environment. Apple has to be very careful in my opinion. When they keep on shitting on their pro users, with the additional lack of build-quality in their new laptops, the community of enthusiastic third-party devs that build for their platform will shrink. I think it's actually quite short-sighted.
Microsoft has a huge chance here to move ahead of Apple even faster. Being a good shepherd for Github would be yet another way of strengthening their new positive image. Let's just hope that's also part of their plan.
I feel completely the same way.
One thing to keep in mind about GitHub is, that they were kinda slow in making progress. I hope this acquisition will speed up the development to the level of VSCode. And if they mess it up, GitLab is REALLY nice - so nice, that it could actually be a drop-in replacement; and has even the possibility of hosting it yourself.
Also: with the Acquisition they own Electron and Atom. I wonder what happens with Atom in the long run.