Microsoft has finally finalized the acquisition of GitHub.
On the evening of June 4, Microsoft officially announced its plan to purchase GitHub, a software code hosting website, with $7.5 billion in stock. The deal is expected to be completed by the end of this year.
GitHub was founded in April 2008, and it has been just 10 years since then. In 2015, GitHub was valued at $2 billion. In just three years, GitHub's market value has nearly quadrupled, making it the most popular social programming and code hosting platform.
According to statistics, as of March this year, GitHub has 28 million high-frequency users, and has hosted 80 million source code repositories for Java, Python and C + +. Public organizations such as NASA and large technology companies such as Google, apple and Amazon also have businesses on GitHub.
As the majority of GitHub users are white men (it is said that the proportion is as high as 97%), so it is nicknamed by Chinese programmers as "the world's largest gay dating website".
Chris wanstrath, CEO of GitHub, said the community platform was profitable as early as 2011. At present, GitHub has three profit models: Code hosting service, data precipitation and cloud storage, and enterprise headhunter recruitment community.
According to CNBC last year, GitHub expects annual revenue of more than $200 million, of which more than $110 million comes from b-end enterprise services revenue.
According to people familiar with the matter, such a profitable company did not choose to go public, but surrendered to Microsoft, in part because of its trust in Microsoft's ability and determination to attach importance to the developer business.
Interestingly, Microsoft used to be a strong opponent of open source software, but after NADELLA became Microsoft's CEO, Microsoft gradually became one of the most active promoters in the open source community. Since 2014, Microsoft has launched hundreds of open source projects since. Net, the basic open-source programming tool of Microsoft. In 2016, Microsoft also surpassed Facebook and Google to reach the top of GitHub's contribution list.
As for the significance of Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub, NADELLA commented on twitter that "Microsoft + GitHub = enabling developers". According to the speculation of industry insiders, from the perspective of Microsoft's merging part of GitHub revenue into the Intelligent Cloud business segment, it is to implement the "Ai + cloud" strategy, so as to encourage developers to develop applications for Microsoft's multi platforms, including the cloud platform azure cloud.
From left to right are Chris wanstrath, co-founder of GitHub, Satya NADELLA, CEO of Microsoft, and NAT Friedman, new CEO of GitHub
Microsoft said that GitHub will maintain its original style in the future, focusing on developers and maintaining independent operation.
After the acquisition, NAT Friedman, vice president of Microsoft, will be the chief executive officer of GitHub, and Chris wanstrath, co-founder and former CEO of GitHub, will become a technical researcher of Microsoft, report to executive vice president Scott Guthrie and carry out strategic software development plan.
For a long time, due to the lessons learned from Nokia, Hotmail, Skype, etc., people hold a mocking and questioning attitude towards those big acquisitions of Microsoft. So what's the future of GitHub? Maybe only time will tell.
