In the developer space, it seems pretty much the same. SourceForge was good/cool until it wasn't, so people moved to Github. Now, as Github perhaps gradually loses steam or coolness (might not happen either), another company will emerge (maybe it's Gitlab) who will take share while Github perhaps spins into irrelevance. Wash, rinse, repeat - but each time the software tends to get cheaper and cheaper, creating a massive deflationary environment as the particular developer tool set becomes commodity.
Or maybe AWS or Google step in with an actual good product (hasn't happened yet as far as I can tell in CI/CD but hey you never know), and they charge nothing for it because it's part of a basket of services. Margin for the standalone company goes to zero.
Developers have, as far as I can tell, almost zero brand loyalty - and that probably makes sense - but it's very tough in my opinion to create great products for developers and make money as a company at the same time.
It seems logical that GitHub will eventually figure out how to make money, even if it is just by following the tried and trusted "project management system" model
I feel like part of this stems from the fact that every service now wants to charge a monthly fee instead of offering a one time purchase.
If you want me to pay $X/mo, that fee has to correlate to the value you are providing me each month. The minute that equation changes, people start to consider other options.
One of the benefits to SaaS is that you can make more money and your revenue is more predictable, but on the other hand it means your market is more susceptible to competition because companies are comparing their options more frequently.
If I am not mistaken Imgur is doing quite well for many years now.
They certainly made a lot of mistakes, had changes in the leadership team and are successful despite that not because of it, but I don't see them dying anytime soon.
$60M burn over 9 months after raising $250M isn't horrible either. If they continue to grow which seems to be the case, they will be break-even long before they run out of money.
The numbers aren't surprising to me; I'm more surprised why Bloomberg makes such a big deal out of it. GitHub's bigger problem is certainly that they stopped improving, had internal team issues, etc. but that's only a small part of the article (vs. a big focus on those numbers).
What are you basing that on?
The article says that in 2015 they had revenue of $95 million and lost $27 million.
For the first 3 quarters of 2016 the article says they “surpassed last year’s revenue […] with $98 million”, but also that they lost $66 million in that same period.
So while revenue doubled, the loss more than doubled, which does not look like they are on the path to break even.
Of course there are many unknowns, but going by the numbers in the article alone, it does not look like a slam dunk.
They're probably sounding alarmist to try maximising attention. :/
this is a pretty bad hit piece from Bloomberg, they should be ashamed
That, ironically, makes me REALLY not want them to go under: they don't deserve to.
It seems like other smaller companies have exploited the profitable parts of Github's niche out from under them.
I think I here a bell tolling.
Supposedly competitors may be cheaper or offer more in the free tier, and I could imagine you'd call Git itself a 'misstep', but otherwise I can only think of incredible cultural and technical achievements by GitHub?
I'll take Oracle, SalesForce, or Microsoft over Google any day of the week. The worst Oracle will do is start charging me more, but god only knows what kind of sleazy ad tracking Google will add. No thank you, I'll move everything over to BitBucket.
Fortunately, I don't think Google will bother. They already shutdown Google Code when they couldn't use it to increase ad revenue, so hopefully they'll leave GitHub alone.
It's a git web interface written in Go and is much more friendly on a VPS with small amounts of memory.
P.S. to put a bit more effort into my post: I really do wonder if the discoverability problem of a decentralized web can be better solved for things like social networks, code sharing, etc.
The only downside is that for a toy project, you have to spend money and resources on it.
Only half-kidding. So many big and small projects are using GitHub as their primary repository and sometimes their only homepage. And there's all those benefits of it being something of a social network as well, and an issue tracker and so on.
I'm sure something else would take its place, but it would take a while before it gets as much momentum.
4 years ago I thought that my GitHub account will get more important, the identity will matter but is that really the case? I don't see the typical network effects and behavior of a social network.
I think all there's is the perception of GitHub being the default choice. That's powerful but far less powerful than truly increased value for me as an user because of the size of the network, you being an user too (eg. Twitter or Uber).
Many people have warned that using these added-value features makes you dependent on GitHub (Linus Torvalds has a kernel mirror on GitHub, but for this reason refuses to use its other features). Migrating all that metadata is hard (is it even possible?).
That said, we don't use issues, the wiki, etc.
In these roles, GitHub is of tremendous value and not immediately replaceable.
There are obviously alternatives but the Github UI just makes it so easy to work with others.
What purge? I'm personally aware of some projects which are still on SourceForge which haven't been touched in >10 years. If there was a purge, it must have been limited to projects with no activity whatsoever.
The business itself may not be a great business due to the amount of cost it takes to run it -- but it's necessary for the running of other ventures.
Sort of like highways and non-toll bridges.
There's no reason that GitHub couldn't be run profitably if they weren't just out there burning VC money as quickly as possible.
Review groups and Projets (kanban) have both been great.
GitLab started applying pressure and I think GitHub responded well, staying competitive in the face of a competent challenger.
Nice big fat waste of money, right there.
The reality is there is no reason for GitHub to have this much funding and spend so frivolously. This should be a warning.
The good news for them, is they can become much more. GitLab learned earlier on, the value of selling to Enterprise as opposed to startups. They (GitHub) really should have gone on a hiring blitz a few years ago, to find people who understood Enterprise.
GitHub, way over estimated the value of "social programming", when it comes to Enterprise. I would say 80% of programmers in Enterprise, are not passionate about programming and have no interest, in the "social" value, that is offered by GitHub Enterprise. The vast majority of Enterprise programmers see it as a job, and really don't care about what others are working on, unless it directly affects whether or not they can leave work on time.
What GitHub needs to focus on, is doing the hard things, that GitLab and Bitbucket will not be able to do, without serious R&D. I personally think, they should abandon Atom at this point, and use those resources to work on solving harder problems, that Enterprise would gladly pay for. Like better searches, better analytics/reports, better code reviews, and so forth.
As GitHub makes certain parts of the software industry significantly more accessible or cheaper, its complements will succeed commensurately. For example, easy access to, and encouraged proliferation of, skilled talent and robust open source (free) software.
That GitHub provides infrastructure for other startups makes sense, but I'd strongly push back on the idea that VCs will invest in a particular company like GitHub primarily because they think it will improve their investments elsewhere. That's a leap in market forecasting, and the simpler (Occam's Razor) and more rational explanation is that they expect(ed) a good return with some added benefit to "the ecosystem."
I'd be more in favor of this argument if you restated it slightly as, "Investors like investing in companies like GitHub because they can initiate feedback loops with their existing investments that result in mutual prosperity."
A scrappy low-budget startup can do just fine with a medium sized vm on one of the several places renting vms, running a simple source code control system server. Blowing dozens of megabucks to build a palace in a high-rent district to replace something that's close to free seems, well, dumb.
I suspect they see it as a charity case, if true.
On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries—without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees.
But without that development we'd be stuck with less security, less features, and a blockchain that took weeks or months to download and verify (instead of days). Bitcoin is only possible because of the massive amount of development going into this unprofitable codebase.
And I believe that Blockstream's investors are well aware that they will never have direct ROI on many of those upgrades.
The latter half of the statement applies to Stripe as well. The big difference between GitHub and Stripe is that Stripe's business model is more directly tied to the growth of entrepreneurship economy: the more money goes through Stripe-powered businesses, the more money Stripe makes. In GitHub's case, the correlation is less direct and less predictable.
You probably meant this:
I think Atlassian is the company that makes the most out of the git marketplace, even if they have fewer customers. They are simply more efficient, and are ready to take over with Bitbucket if GitHub fails.
Also, many companies pay for Jira+Confluence even if they use GitHub.
GitHub and GitLab are not bound by the same constraints, and can focus on creating the best end to end Git hosting product. While Atlassian has to be careful about cannibalizing other product lines.
FWIW, with the latest releases, they've addressed most of the remaining features that were missing from Crucible, and I'm very happy now with the PR/code review flow in Bitbucket Server.
Think or know? For enterprise version control, I would be surprised if they made more than Github. I'll take enterprise Github over Stash any day.
(1) They went on a hiring spree in 2015-16, dramatically increasing their costs before their revenue was able to keep up. Something to keep an eye on in 2017.
(2) Half the team is remote! Kudos to them for making this work.
FWIW, I believe they're retrenching heavily on this. I remember reading articles about how they're trying to centralize management, and if you look at their jobs page (https://github.com/about/jobs#positions) most of their eng positions are SF only, at least the three or so I looked at. Only their support positions seem to be remote.
Are you being sarcastic (esp, in light of your point 1) )?
Out of curiosity from someone not in the know, would remote employees cost more or less than ones made to come in every morning?
Definitely not, I work remote. I feel I am more productive as remote employee, probably about 10-20% more. I read somewhere that for every 10 miles you commute daily, it costs you $10,000/year in gas/vehicle wear-and-tear/health and psychological side effects, etc, not to mention the lost hours sitting in traffic.
Would you rather have your employees sitting in traffic, or working on critical projects?
That said, I feel for the engineering staff that has to deal with the availability requirements and the DDoS events. Those folks are heroes.
That said, they should be doing better margin-wise since they would have relatively lower customer acquisition costs compared to the market since they have so much developer recognition.
Can someone explain the rationale behind pumping all this money into firms that clearly don't need such vast amounts of it, which only spurs exorbitant and unnecessary spending? Is it some sort of non-obvious game of unicorn musical chairs hoping for a hyper inflated exit before the music stops?
The hook for the founders? Who knows. My guesses:
- assumption that eventually the enterprise play will win the majority of the $ in the market
- that there is possibly a winner-takes-all dynamic in the market, given the strong ecosystem benefits
Also, it's very expensive to sell top-down to enterprises. In SaaS your cost of sale is up-front (sales salaries, commissions, acquiring the customer etc) whereas the payout is typically over time. Even if the contracts are mostly paid up front, you still have to build the enterprise sales team and ramp the reps, which can take around 6 months. So it's possible that the logical premise "pumping all this money into firms that clearly don't need such vast amounts of it" may be incorrect if enterprise sales success is required for long term success and they don't have the cash to 'go enterprise'.
Will be fascinating to see how this market plays out. My money is on Sid.
Github should be a pillar platform in our community for the next decade, and the only way for them to become that is via profitability.
If anything we should be cheering for gitlab. Atleast we can modify it locally.
Competition & long term stability means that they can focus on the features that are most meaningful for their user base. If their revenue stream continues to be poor, they may begin making short-term decisions to prop up revenue, which ultimately will lead to a much poorer product over the long term.
I travelled for an hour and he sat there staring at his phone between looking at me like something he had trodden in.
At least pointing tens of companies at Gitlab has made me feel better.
I don't care how advanced GitHub is; that is an INSANE number of employees for this kind of business!
If you calculate back from there, let's say $12M in ARR in Sep'13, $6M in Sep'12 and $4-5M in May'12 - that's insane (them raising $100M). Not sure if Bloomberg's data is correct but if we look at the other data points (probably same source data), $90M in ARR in Sep'16, it seems to be accurate.
Sep'12: $6M (assumed) -- raised $100M a couple of months earlier Sep'13: $12M (assumed) Sep'14: $25M (according to Bloomberg) Sep'15: $50M (assumed) Sep'16: $90M (according to Bloomberg)
The Sillicon Valley episodes write themselves it seems haha. This is hilarious.
edit: whoops, businessinsider is shit. Here's the original article: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-va...
I guess I'm just a lot more frugal, and mostly isolated from this culture.
But when they can't afford it, my eyes start rolling pretty hard.
I had never seen him, so I'm posting this in case others were in the same boat.
It just goes to show that having a profile on a website does not define who you are as a developer. Websites go under, and better ones will rise up. I hope GitHub does stay around... I do not care for their "politics" but I like their service.
How much would you be willing to pay to store your open-source code at github?
Gitlab is superior in every possible way than Github except for it's speed.
That's why I asked the Q. Seems strange that large FOSS projects are hosted but no effort by github made to get some return.
So if you're hosting your own tools, BB still gets paid and you don't have to switch vendors.
(my personal feelings about Atlassian rank somewhere between dislike and dread, but the BitBucket integration is one the least offensive bits).
I had a recent conversation with a prospect and they took issue with the price of our software. Our app is in a specialized industry (ie. a smaller market). We charge a per use fee of $35. This fee enables our customer to immediately earn nearly $200 (a 5x return with no risk to them). Despite the significant benefit and profitability of using the app the prospect took issue with our price and referred to the cost of other apps.
It was that conversation that made me realize how we've become accustomed to the quality and price of software that's been heavily subsidized by massive VC investments.
If your lead really understood that they would "immediately earn a 5x return with no risk", and that was the truth, they would be cartoonishly foolish to not take that offer. Furthermore, wouldn't that mean your company could be printing money with its results? It's hard for me to believe a rational customer wouldn't take that deal, so either they didn't understand or believe that would be the result, or you're exaggerating here for the benefit of your point.
I know it's easy to think I'm just griefing you over this, but I'm trying to make a point in good faith. There are certainly legitimate reasons to dislike the profit incentives that venture capitalists encourage, but I think you portray their impact on small companies as unrealistically bad (and perhaps your product in a more favorable light than is warranted), to the detriment of a discussion about it.
None of this is personal, mind you. Just a comment.
We don't live in a world of rational agents. And even if we did we don't live in a world where most business purchases are made with people's own money. People have complex and contradictory goals and in my experience pointing out the value customers get for the price they pay is the least effective sales strategy.
Regarding your disbelief, you assume (like economists) that consumers are rational actors. They aren't. There are 2 reasons why the customer pushed back. One, they thought the price was unfair--e.g. "Hey MS Office costs me $5/mth, and your software which does less costs me several hundred a month, you charge too much."
Second, the customer is already earning a significant salary, so an extra $5,000 a year isn't meaningful for him. (Yeh, crazy isn't it). This is our first sales effort and we are learning how to position the product to overcome these objections--part of the problem was that we didn't anticipate push back and didn't properly position the product to avoid these concerns.
Folks are trained to get many types of products for free. I've seen similar cases where businesses refuse to pay for things like licensed information that have a clear and obvious value.
Leaving aside the question of what their intentions are, do VCs do something economically equivalent?
And now bringing back intentions, if the economic effects (and the resulting impact on customers) are the same, does the intention matter?
Not to mention open source, sponsored by big companies, universities and passionate individual contributors. E.g. try and sell a compiler, a JS framework or an IDE.
If you use a totally-permissive BSD-style license, you're stuck trying to charge for a support contract or custom plugins or something.
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/nz/app/tunelab-piano-tuner/id335568...
The software is so cheap now...
Oh, and provide a 10% discount of they buy the $99 version NOW. Offer ends soon. ;)
There's something strange going on here. What software do you produce?
- An industry that has a slight disdain for maximizing profit (healthcare here is a public good) - The physician in question is already running at 100%, so the extra workload to make an extra $5k/yr isn't worth it for him. - Other docs in the clinic are all over our solution and are seeing the increase in their billings
So, this doc, and another in the clinic looked at the fee and said they'd rather not realize the extra revenue because they thought someone else should be paying the software fee (the someone else being the government that runs healthcare).
See: Uber
I think this anxiety is why there's a lot of work being done in the decentralized space right now. The UX-side of "web 3.0" is sorely lacking but I think it's only a matter of time before people begin to crack it.
I'd love to see some research into what it would take (in terms of network size) to provide robust, decentralized replacements for service-as-infrastructure products like Github.
The world would crumble/ it's probably some sort of weird national security scenario.
My thought is that, apart from core infrastructure, and expanding internal capabilities, there's not going to be governmental protection of businesses/American internet entities (aside from what protection already exists in the form of legal code), if only because it would compete/displace with already existing businesses (CloudFlare, Akami, etc) which is something the US is loathe to do (which is part of the reason why flood insurance is so messed up - there exists a program to help homeowners get flood insurance, but it's by law required to not displace existing insurers).
Stop building systems with single points of failure. Doubly so when you don't control them!
Our risk plans should mitigate the immediate and permanent loss of GitHub at any moment, or we should be ashamed to use the title "engineer."
By the other hand, Atom is clearly a long term loser and they should let it go. Their contribution to the text editing world was terrific but now they should focus where they are the best.
I put my private stuff on my own Gogs instance or on Bitbucket, tho I like Gogs UI much better, it's closer to github. The community fork of it, Gitea, is also making progress to enable pull request federation.
Would be awesome if I could work together with people using Gitlab, Github or Gitea without them having to sign up to my site. They just fork to their own site, make their patches and submit the pull request to my upstream.
GitHub has little value to me, the social network they built can move elsewhere like it is for many programmers and coders.
If a company as vitally important to an industry as Github is to software can't do this... it's time to really worry.
Now, the thing is very competitive, and many companies offer "exponential growth". If your growth slows down, if the perspective is not good, divestment starts and that is a downwards spiral.
To stay competitive and to prevent an investor run, companies are forced to take massive risks. And risks materialize into huge disasters... like this one apparently.
This is apparently working very well.
These sort of statements are a little annoying. I understand that Bloomberg has to write for a less technical audience, but the writer must know this isn't an accurate comparison.
>You Don’t Need Venture Capital
>A lot has been written recently about how the venture capital world is changing. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, but I’ve learned enough to say that a web startup like ours doesn’t need any outside money to succeed. I know this because we haven’t taken a single dime from investors. We bootstrapped the company on a few thousand dollars and became profitable the day we opened to the public and started charging for subscriptions.
I guess VCing up and losing money is a choice. They probably figure the odd $100m cash loss will end up as $1bn+ on the market cap. He looks quite cheerful in his rich list write up http://www.forbes.com/profile/tom-preston-werner/
As soon as a company starts parroting political messages like "white middle managers have no empathy" instead of, you know, building good tools, I know it's time to find another solution. I was a paying customer, and when github got into the political game, I dropped them like a bad habit.
I'm not screwing around here, I'm trying to build a business and your political aspirations do _nothing_ for me as a customer, so why don't you take them and shove em. Happy customer at bitbucket ever since.
