Microsoft has finally finalized the news of the acquisition of GitHub.
In the evening of June 4th, Microsoft issued a notice, officially announcing the plan to buy software code hosting site GitHub for $7 billion 500 million, which is expected to be completed by the end of this year.
GitHub was founded in April 2008 and has just been ten years. In 2015, GitHub was valued at $2 billion, and in just three years, the market value of GitHub rose nearly 4 times, becoming the most popular social programming and code hosting platform.
According to statistics, as of March this year, the number of high frequency users of GitHub reached 28 million, and 80 million source repositories were managed for programming language software such as Java, Python and C++. NASA and other public institutions and Google, apple, Amazon and other large technology companies also have business on GitHub.
Because GitHub community users are mostly white men (the proportion is said to be up to 97%), Chinese programmers have been dubbed the "world's largest homosexual dating website" by Chinese programmers.
GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath said community platforms had made profits in the early 2011. At present, there are three main profit models of GitHub: Code hosting service, data settling and cloud storage, and enterprise headhunting recruitment community.
According to CNBC's report last year, GitHub expects annual revenue to exceed $200 million, of which more than $110 million comes from B end enterprise services revenue.
Such a profitable company, which has not chosen to go public, is subject to Microsoft, partly because of its confidence in the ability and determination of Microsoft to attach importance to the developer's business.
Interestingly, Microsoft was a strong opponent of open source software, but after Nadella's Microsoft CEO, Microsoft gradually became one of the most active promoters of the open source community. From the 2014 Microsoft open source programming basic tool.NET, Microsoft has launched hundreds of open source projects in succession; in 2016, Microsoft has also surpassed the Facebook and Google and topped the list of GitHub's contributions.
As for the significance of Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub, Nadella commented on twitter that "Microsoft + GitHub = energy developers". According to industry speculates, from Microsoft's GitHub part of revenue and into the smart cloud business sector, it is to implement the "AI + cloud" strategy to promote the developers to develop and apply the multi platform for Microsoft, including the cloud platform Azure Cloud.
From left to right is GitHub co founder Chris Wanstrath, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, GitHub new CEO Nat Friedman.
Microsoft said that the future operation of GitHub will remain the original style, with the highest level of development and independent operation.
After the completion of the acquisition, Microsoft Corp vice president Nat Friedman will be the chief executive officer of GitHub, GitHub co founder and former CEO Chris Wanstrath will become a Microsoft technology researcher, reporting to the executive vice president Scott Guthrie, and developing a strategic software development plan.
All along, from NOKIA, Hotmail, Skype and other lessons, people are mockery of Microsoft's big acquisitions. So what is the fate of GitHub in the future? It may only be time to give the answer.
