It's historically been tough to compare them to Atlassian because Atlassian has provided tons of other enterprise services like Jira and Confluence, and an 8 year lead plus going public, but I think Github is definitely working on better squeezing into the enterprise space with this current announcement.
This makes sense. Atlassian is good at making money from its services and it is increasing its overall ecosystem here.
Github moves really slow in comparison. I guess Github is more focused, but there are a lot of contrasts between Github and Atlassian, and in terms of making money I think Atlassian is doing a lot better.
Has Github acquired anything significant? Github should have acquired Zenhub (which is Trello integrated into Github for the most part) instead of slowing trying to recreate it -- although I guess Github has better code purity if they develop it themselves, but it means they move slower.
The GitHub story is complex. There was a time years ago when they were profitable: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-... They and Sidekiq were the poster children of bootstrapped profitable businesses around open source. Something very clearly changed (most likely raising a boatload from VC firms and the ensuing perils) that flipped the situation.
They did a pretty good job on Slashdot so far, and I think the community response has been rather positive. Hopefully they can turn SF around, as well. GitHub is great, but it's good to have competition to avoid monocultures.
Do you know if Github has released any public information about this? From what I can tell, they were a profitable successful company even before they went and took some VC funding and at that point they didn't have on-prem. In general, most big companies I know use the atlassian suite instead of Github for code.
True, and I also find it BETTER. It actually came when Atlassian bought out BitBucket[1]. I personally believe GitHub success is founded on git "winning" the DVCS wars, but I won't downplay the fact that they contributed to this.
Interesting, I had no idea they had such a following. Github doesn't surprise me, they seem like the kind of company that would dabble in any technology just for the hell of it.
Github was founded in 2008. I think it's fairly reasonable to expect that an 8 years old company shows some kind of path to profitability, especially when you consider the popularity of the plarform an the amount of VC money it attracted. When you're near peak popularity and competition is heating up, being profitable or at least being cash flow positive is a good thing.
According to https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/11/github-has-a-110-million-run..., GitHub had a run rate of $200 million in August 2017, but still is not profitable per the Bloomberg article. The writing was on the wall here. They've focused on user growth and solidifiying their infrastructure, without much concern for profit - of course they're looking for an exit.
I wonder if they chose to not go public due to the overlap with the Atlassian market. There wouldn't be much to distinguish themselves in an IPO. They are - in the minds of many developers - better and cooler than Atlassian, but with less revenue. Perhaps GitHub figured a buyout had the better expected value, rather than risk being viewed as a me-too by investors.
I never really understood why GitHub succeeded over a decentralized model. It's a social network for a service that does not need to be a social network. The small git hosting services that existed before GitHub got huge were just fine. It's like what Reddit did to smaller forums - Reddit was not better, but it won the popularity lottery when Digg destroyed itself. I think the internet would be better without these massive centralized services. I hope the users who do decide to flee GitHub don't aggregate elsewhere and end up in the same situation a few years from now.
https://www.quora.com/How-close-is-GitHub-to-returning-to-pr...
https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-...
http://www.businessinsider.com/github-is-now-worth-2-billion...
It's historically been tough to compare them to Atlassian because Atlassian has provided tons of other enterprise services like Jira and Confluence, and an 8 year lead plus going public, but I think Github is definitely working on better squeezing into the enterprise space with this current announcement.
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