That said, Microsoft’s plan on keeping GitHub independent and all the acceleration to make it a developer platform as opposed to just a VCS/SCM solution, with bets into CI/CD, security, and AI shows it would have been the better play than Google even if Google price matched. Google also had less to gain from the deal on a relative basis, so Microsoft could offer a higher price. Google would never have offered $10B for a $200M revenue company (at the time). It’s easy to forget that multiples were much smaller in 2018 than they were in 2021-2023. In fact GitHub was the largest enterprise software VC-backed acquisition ever at the time.
And a healthy dose of ex-post rationalization when you happened to be right.
You are totally wrong. Google had everything to gain by capturing the developer funnel from GH into GCP. It has nothing to do with 200M revenue. It has to do with mindshare about which cloud platform you are using.
They should have given CI/CD away, every commit a build and test run, just like Google internal. Start layering extra services, at zero cost.
It would have been half a percent of load compared to actual workloads running on GCP.
And a healthy dose of ex-post rationalization when you happened to be right.