[wilsonnb]

> GitHub being unprofitable makes the situation worse because one knows then MS intend to make major changes: either to destroy it, or squeeze money from it.

GitHub no longer needs to directly turn a profit now that it is owned by Microsoft. They just need to use GitHub to increase their profits from Azure (or any of Microsoft's other money makers). I don't think they need to make drastic changes to GitHub for that to happen.

[pbhjpbhj]

How do you envision them forcing^W encouraging use of Azure, or other MS paid offerings, through GitHub?

I can see that working if they don't meddle with GitHub for the next decade, and keep it running well; then people might be convinced to try MS's other offerings.

Maybe Heroku style "run this project on your own Azure instance now" (perhaps GitHub does this already?)? Is Azure's rep good enough to pull that off?

[wilsonnb]

I haven't heard anyone say anything bad about Azure that can't be said about AWS, GCP, or whatever IBM calls their cloud hosting service.

That is exactly the kind of feature I think they will implement. They will probably add more support in Visual Studio and VSCode for GitHub as well, although their support is already pretty good as far as I know.

They can also throw paid GitHub features in with their Office 365 package, like they currently do with Skype. That would further consolidate companies on the Microsoft platform by ensuring that they don't have to leave it for code hosting.