Yes, that’s how it sounded when you used it too. Good thing there was no pretense to the obverse when I did so.
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Looks like George Gilder had it ALL wrong.
Seriously wrong. Like since the last 40 years or so wrong.
(not just on tech.)
These being tech companies, they use base 2, so 4x is 2 orders of magnitude.
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Okay, why is nobody asking “Why TF is Github worth 7.5bn?”
I don’t see it, unless MS wants to sell back-end access to huge code repos to enable corporate espionage or some other crazy shit that’s probably not the case.
So if there’s no clear business strategy there, the answer is probably some fuckery. My theory is that MS is just plain and simple getting outbid by FB, Google and various Valley incubators for all the sexy and hot commodities. And in SV, if you’re not acquiring companies left and right, everyone thinks you’re a loser - so they bought a company they don’t really know what to do with for waaaaay too much money “because developers, or something, we guess” because it makes headlines and keeps them from looking too much like has-beens to lazy investors.
Who’s gonna patronize a little bitty two by four kinda store anymore? Well, I don’t know much about tech but I do know you can’t make a living selling big trombones, no sir.
I don’t think MS has officially supported SourceSafe since before I got my first programming job a decade ago (where we used SourceSafe 6 for a couple of years before moving to SVN). The replacement, Team Foundation Services, was basically a NIH version of Git, and Visual Studio has offered native Git support for years now.
OK. 7.5 Billion is a bit much, but GitHub is an extremely valuable brand and technology. For a long time GitHub was associated with everything good about OSS and MS everything bad. Both of those associations have been slowly changing in the last few years, but I’d bet one of the many things that MS wants to do with GitHub is use it as a bit of brand washing.
Developers have been fleeing the .net ecosystem for a while now and in the last few years MS has really been embracing node and JavaScript (not in a shitty way, as they tried in the early 2000s, but in a real collaborative and open way). My guess is that this GitHub thing is a real push to take on developer mindshare.
7.5 billion is probably too much, but for a company with all this $$$ in the bank, there’s a chance that this will pay out for them.
Though, I’m much more doubtful that it will pay out for all of us.
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SourceSafe…now there’s a word I’d hoped I’d never hear again. Back in the late 90s, I lost all my repositories several times due to corrupted files. It was really quite terrible. Thankfully, I was able to use the checked-out code as a backup, so all I lost was the history, but that kind of defeats the purpose of version control.
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For a while, they were running SourceSafe under the covers, with a new name and shell around it.
$7.5B in Microsoft stock, so…
Like CyanogenMod? Embraced, extinguished…
Back door access to private repos, perhaps?
IMO, the implosion of CyanogenMod had less to do with EEE than with drama queens (a problem I’ve noticed time and time again in the Android mod community, and one of the things that turned me off of XDA).
To be fair, porting Android over to (insert phone model here) can be hard work, especially when a phone’s internals are poorly documented at best. Worse, it’s all too easy to brick your phone if you don’t do things exactly right, and you sometimes have to run what are basically sketchy-as-fuck exploits to crack things open enough to install a custom ROM, but still there’s a lot of “STFU, noob!” over there, compounded by actual noobs who lack Clue.
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He seems to have come out OK; because it’s not as though he got stiffed into real penury, and his passion appears to be the engineering rather than the money; but Woz got the shove pretty early. His ability to wring simplicity and cost reductions out of designs were valuable from the point where Steve was passing off his work to Atari, through the end of the Apple II; but thereafter he was no longer useful; and both he and his design preferences disappeared from the company fairly quickly.
Some remnants were retained for quite a while(ADB took a long while to die even externally; and was still being used vestigially for some laptop keyboards and touchpads well into the USB era(much as PS/2 lived on on the PC side for embedded peripherals well after the external connectors mostly disappeared); but the move from building comparatively open Apples to hermetically sealed, if elegant, Macs was pretty much it for his overall design influence.
I think you’ve misunderstood. I don’t mean they’re coming for him now.
He did well before kill zones. Do you think he would have created what he did, under current tech-bro as molded by wall street, circumstance? Steve Jobs took advantage of him, but not near as much advantage personally as is described today as nearly systemic.
Maybe you’re trying to chat down his contributions, looks so? Why so? It’s a tangent from the topic. Please lets stay on topic together, and my example was Steve Wozniak in todays environment.
Fair enough. I suppose any consumer-facing project with those constraints is going to be hell to deal with as a baseline state.
Must admit I’m rather “off” the entire mobile ecosystem… almost ready to glue to GSM radio to a Raspberry Pi and ditch conventional phones… Go 100% open source and avoid the “kill zone” problem all together.
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