In the first place, to understand this Microsoft acquisition, one needs to understand Microsoft’s structure and its different operating segments. At this time, as per the annual report 2017, they have three operating segments :
- Productivity & Business Processes: Following Office enterprise/consumer, LinkedIn & Dynamics (CRM & stuff)
- Intelligent Cloud: Azure, Visual Studio & services for them.
- More Personal Computing: Windows, devices (Xbox & Surface) and search advertising.
Since Nadella’s appointment as CEO in 2014, he’s made three acquisitions and each of the divisions mentioned below, including Github.
Acquisitions
The blue-marked ones are the largest acquisition Microsoft made till that time, and the ones in red are the attempts that largely failed to yield the results.
A series of layoffs happened: 2014(18000), 2015(8,500) and 2016(1,850) to make space and re-align the organisation. However, two new divisions recently, Experiences & Devices and Cloud + AI, are in the introduction phase.
Open Source
They also have actively contributed towards open source, being the largest contributors on Github as of the 2017 report :
Dot Net was open-sourced in 2014, along with many ML frameworks, VS code, and other tools.
Microsoft under Nadella is a different beast. and their game plan since Nadella has been totally the opposite of Ballmer.
- Their acquisitions are very much in line with Microsoft. They have been up internally for quite some time & results have been encouraging.
- So basically, they are playing a game between productivity, cloud and leveraging ML wherever possible using data. Undoubtedly, access to the data regarding languages, merge histories, commits etc, will be incredibly useful. Furthermore, to understand and make possible something like commit assist from Ubisoft available on a larger scale.
References