In the first place to understand this Microsoft acquisition, one needs to understand Microsoft’s structure and it’s different operating segments. At this time as per the annual report of 2017, they have 3 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 3 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, recently two new divisions Experiences & Devices along with Cloud + AI are in introduction phase.
Open Source
They also have actively contributed towards open source being largest contributors on Github as of 2017 report :
Dot Net is open sourced in 2014 along with lots of ML frameworks, VS code and several other tools.
Microsoft under Nadella is a different beast. and their game plan since Nadella has been totally opposite of Ballmer.
- Their acquisitions are very much in line with Microsoft. They has been up to 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 just the 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