In 2014, Microsoft Corp. cloud chief Scott Guthrie wrote up a proposal to acquire GitHub Inc. Then he filed the plan\u00a0away in a drawer. Every once in a while he’d take the plan out and look at it, and then return it to the cabinet.<\/p>\n
Guthrie felt Microsoft just wasn’t ready to acquire the popular open-source company — a\u00a0widely used digital hive where millions of software programmers collaborate on, share and store code. \u201cWe would have screwed it up,\u201d Guthrie said. What\u2019s more, developers \u2013 many of whom viewed Microsoft as public enemy No. 1 for its attacks on freely distributed open-source software\u00a0\u2013\u00a0would have rioted.<\/p>\n
“The open-source world would\u2019ve rightly looked at us at the time as the antichrist,” he said. “We didn\u2019t have the credibility that we have now around open source.” The company was still largely focused on its own software, completely created in-house\u00a0and owned by Microsoft.<\/p>\n
Since then,\u00a0Microsoft has turned itself into\u00a0one of the biggest developers of open-source software\u00a0and has persuaded customers to trust applications built using rival tools and programs to Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing service, boosting Azure revenue and usage.<\/p>\n
More than 60 percent of the company\u2019s team that works with cloud-app developers were hired for their expertise in non-Microsoft programming tools or cloud services. A full version of the open-source Linux operating system is even being added to Windows. The efforts are bringing\u00a0new software builders to the Microsoft camp.<\/p>\n
Last June, Guthrie and Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella finally unveiled an agreement to acquire GitHub. While there was still some initial agita in the developer community and rivals gained some refugee users from GitHub, one year later the deal is noteworthy mainly for how little drama it’s caused. Most GitHub users just continued putting their code there.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome people were upset, but few, because Microsoft had spent years building up goodwill with the open-source community,\u201d said Matt Asay, an Adobe Inc. senior director\u00a0who is a longtime open-source developer and previous Microsoft opponent. \u201cThere was a knee-jerk sort of \u2018remember, they’re the Great Satan\u2019 reaction, but it was halfhearted.\u201d<\/p>\n
Appealing to a wider swath of developers is important for Microsoft\u2019s growth prospects. Tools and software that help engineers write programs generate a small portion of Microsoft\u2019s revenue, dwarfed by units like cloud services and Windows \u2013\u00a0but they lure users to the bigger businesses.<\/p>\n
Winning over software developers is key to getting them to write apps from games to business software that dovetail with Microsoft products or that are housed in Microsoft\u2019s Azure cloud. Developers\u2019 hearts and minds have also been key to Microsoft\u2019s revived reputation as a technology leader.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are more developers today that Microsoft is being relevant to,\u201d said S. Somasegar, managing director at Madrona Venture Group\u00a0who spent 27 years at Microsoft, including running the developer division when it began increasing its focus on open source.<\/p>\n
Five years ago, the company was far more insular. When Nadella took over as CEO in 2014, more than a decade of developer defections had left the company in a weak position. Microsoft had been unable to rally engineers to build apps for its phones and tablets. The biggest startups were built on open-source tools, and growing young\u00a0companies like Uber Technologies Inc.\u00a0and Airbnb Inc. chose Amazon.com Inc.\u2019s cloud.<\/p>\n
The mass defection of software developers represented\u00a0a dramatic reversal of fortune for a company that was founded in 1975 as a developer tools company \u2013\u00a0Bill Gates and Paul Allen\u2019s first products were languages meant to enable coders to program early home computers. Later on, the Windows operating system\u2019s dominance meant everyone wrote programs for it.<\/p>\n
But even as video surfaced in the early 2000s of then-CEO Steve Ballmer working\u00a0up a sweat onstage\u00a0cheering for \u201cdevelopers,\u201d\u00a0the company was losing them in droves. The rise of internet-based computing and later mobile phones\u00a0pushed programmers to other languages and mobile app stores.<\/p>\n
Microsoft executives termed the increasingly popular Linux and open-source tools a \u201ccancer\u201d and an anathema to the \u201cAmerican Way,\u201d angering an entire community of engineers, including\u00a0people like Asay.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur investments were really Windows-only,\u201d said Julia Liuson, who runs Microsoft\u2019s Visual Studio products, which are used to develop software, applications and web sites. By 2012, developers told her they no longer looked to Microsoft to provide them with programming languages and end tools. \u201cYou got this really clear sense that we were their past but not part of their future.\u201d<\/p>\n
After Nadella replaced Ballmer, Microsoft began releasing some key\u00a0products\u00a0 \u2013\u00a0including one of Liuson\u2019s Visual Studio programs \u2013 under an open-source license, so any programmer could use\u00a0and make adjustments to it.\u00a0Nadella also wanted to boost Azure usage by recruiting Linux devotees. They weren\u2019t in a forgiving mood. Microsoft engineers frequently found themselves unwelcome at the table \u2013\u00a0literally. Liuson sent a delegation to a Linux conference a few years ago. When they sat down at the lunch tables, existing occupants scattered at the sight of their Microsoft badges, she said.<\/p>\n
Microsoft tried to reboot the entire way it works with developers, starting with a basic but arcane part of the relationship — the reams of highly technical articles about products, which include sample code and blueprints for interested engineers. To overhaul these instruction manual-type documents, Guthrie brought back Microsoft veteran Jeff Sandquist, who had started his career in 1997 on the company\u2019s telephone support hotline for software developers and decamped for Twitter Inc. in 2013.<\/p>\n
Upon his return, Sandquist worked to make the\u00a0articles fresher and more accurate, with more technical depth. He bolstered Microsoft’s ability to write documentation for developers working with\u00a0Java, Python and Linux\u00a0\u2013\u00a0all of which had gained prominence as Microsoft\u2019s tools faded. Without clear and compelling documentation for a wider array of systems, Microsoft couldn\u2019t hope to gain credibility with developers, Sandquist said.<\/p>\n
Next, Sandquist began to set up a team of experts who could reach out directly to cloud-app developers to get them to reconsider Microsoft. The company has always reached out to developers, but this time, in a Microsoft\u00a0now embracing open source and trying to lure a wide array of engineers to use Azure, Sandquist\u2019s new team would have to include top experts spanning the full range of non-Microsoft technologies.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe hired a number of people where the first day they were using Azure was probably their second day at Microsoft,\u201d said Sandquist, who is now general manager for\u00a0developer relations.<\/p>\n
Sandquist aimed to create a diverse team in several respects: expertise, gender, race and location \u2013 unlike many other technical teams, much of it is based outside the company\u2019s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.<\/p>\n
He hired people like Emily Freeman, then a Washington D.C.-based ghostwriter for tech entrepreneurs,\u00a0who underwent a \u201cslightly more than quarter-life crisis\u201d and switched to coding despite having no prior programming experience.<\/p>\n
With a baby daughter, she moved to Denver and\u00a0learned the web application framework Ruby on Rails, ending\u00a0up as a developer-relations expert. The\u00a0role\u00a0let her blend\u00a0newly gained coding skills with her older talent for communication, she said, providing technical information to developers, answering their questions and relaying their needs and concerns back to her employer.<\/p>\n
About two years ago she heard Microsoft was looking for people like her for its cloud advocacy team \u2013 experts in areas outside its core.<\/p>\n
\u201cDevelopers are skeptics by nature \u2013 the majority of people have started to take notice, but a lot of people are still in that phase where they still want a little more proof,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Some customers are talking notice. Adobe, where Asay works, is an Azure customer that uses Java and Red Hat Linux. So is Maersk, the shipping giant.<\/p>\n
Carlsberg, the beer maker, has some of its Azure applications running SUSE Linux, and the same goes for Coke One North America, which handles the technology for North American Coca-Cola bottlers. GitHub, which hosts code for companies large and small, will continue to be a barometer of developer feelings about its parent company.<\/p>\n
Since Microsoft\u2019s deal for GitHub, other tech giants have also sought out ways to get closer to the open source community’s roots. When International Business Machines Corp.\u00a0agreed to buy Linux developer Red Hat Inc. for $33\u00a0billion last year, it raised some similar concerns for developers, even though IBM has been working on Linux projects for two decades. In announcing the acquisition, IBM took pains to assure developers that it would remain committed\u00a0to Red Hat’s open-source work.<\/p>\n
So far, Microsoft has done little to interfere with GitHub.\u00a0Like Microsoft acquisition LinkedIn, GitHub has its own CEO and is run independently. The prevailing management ethos seems to be to try to add\u00a0features users appreciate \u2013 for example, making some private code repositories free to host \u2013 while not messing with\u00a0anything they did like.\u00a0 Last week, GitHub announced a system that lets people fund their favorite GitHub\u00a0contributors \u2013 a sort of\u00a0Patreon for coders.<\/p>\n
GitHub CEO Nat Friedman has instructed his team that the needs of GitHub customers come first, even if they conflict with Microsoft’s desire to promote its other products. In November, Friedman went to his first AWS re:Invent, the flagship cloud conference of Microsoft\u2019s biggest rival Amazon, to sit alongside Amazon cloud officials and meet with joint customers. He\u2019s also inked a closer deal with Google Cloud.<\/p>\n
Still, rivals GitLab and Bitbucket, owned by Atlassian Corp., say many GitHub users have decamped for their sites: Bitbucket said the day after the Microsoft deal was announced was its biggest signup day ever, while GitLab says it gained about 113,000 code repositories that were moved from GitHub.<\/p>\n
Friedman says his company has grown, too. In the almost 12 months\u00a0since Microsoft\u2019s $7.5 billion purchase of the site was announced, the number of registered developers that called the site home has risen to 36 million from 28 million.<\/p>\n
There are customers who worry\u00a0that, over time, GitHub will slip more into Microsoft’s shadow.\u00a0 Reza Zadeh, CEO of Matroid, an artificial intelligence company that competes with Microsoft, is still happily using GitHub \u2013\u00a0but Microsoft\u2019s ownership does make him a little uneasy. He assumes in the future GitHub will be somewhat more aggressive about encouraging users to choose Azure.<\/p>\n
GitHub will have to fight that tendency, CEO Friedman said.<\/p>\n
\u201cGitHub has to be neutral and GitHub has to be independent,\u201d he said. \u201cDevelopers want choice. GitHub can\u2019t have any favoritism.\u201d<\/p>\n
A full version of the open-source Linux operating system is being added to Windows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":242088,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[123],"class_list":["post-308555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-software","tag-microsoft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308555"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308555\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}