Google was in the running to acquire GitHub, according to head of its cloud arm

[snug]

Sensationalist title

> “I wouldn’t have minded buying them, but it’s OK,” Greene said at a Fortune Magazine event in San Francisco on Wednesday.

[malvosenior]

The whole article is really weird. It has the quote about it being "OK" that MS bought Github, followed by a non-sequitur article about Google employees protesting military contracts.

I don't see a connection between the two but I suppose the author is implying that Google didn't buy Github because it was distracted with its own internal turmoil around the protests?

[Nuzzerino]

You can pretty much expect clickbait bordering on fake news from Bloomberg these days. There has been a pattern of it.

[JaimeThompson]

Google buying them would have been amazing, for about 2 years until Google closed them for not having enough users or they added ads to everything.

[devereaux]

I am personally grateful to Microsoft for 1) saving github, because I love github 2) reducing the amount of private information that will go into Google database, because I fear Google.

Years ago, Google was about do no evil and Microsoft was the evil empire. It's funny how we've gone full 180.

[MaxLeiter]

they probably just would’ve made it another chat client

[dvfjsdhgfv]

It's hard to believe now, but it wasn't a very long time ago that Google was doing some very, very strange things trying to push Google+ down everyone's throats, especially on YouTube. I really have no idea of what they would use GitHub for. With MS it's more or less clear: they will put ads of Azure, Visual Studio and other dev-related products on GitHub; with time, they'll also use their front page to announce their dev conferences and so on. Eventually, as Nat said, their aim is to "earn the trust" of open source devs, so that they perceive MS in a positive way (they already succeeded partially, as many comments on HN demonstrate). With Google, I have no idea what would happen. It could be anything, really.

[nashashmi]

Sting! Just like code.Google.Com

[chis]

This gives some perspective. Google buying GitHub would’ve been a tragedy. In fact, I can’t think of a single megacorporation I’d rather have running GitHub than Microsoft in 2018.

Still a shame they couldn’t stay independent though.

[ursus_bonum]

Google would have stepped on Octocat's neck and blown its pretty little head off.

Microsoft will either low-key torture it to death or leave it alone. Who's to say?

[outside2344]

The new model at Microsoft is to run these big acquisitions as separate companies with a lot of autonomy. I suspect Github will do very well from here.

[scottbomb]

Wow, who writes that crap? Grammatical errors left and right. Let me guess, it's either a bot our a product of foreign outsourcing.

[jeremiep]

> Wow, who writes that crap?

Have you read your own comment?