Developing relationships with developers and acquiring new talent is a huge opportunity here.
This is one of my favorite acquisition stories so far in 2018. GitHub (notice the cute mascot) really is the Switzerland of code. I’m not going to lie, this might not stay the same after the Microsoft acquisition. Devs have a way of preferring something that feels a bit more brand agnostic and independent.
However it’s also a huge opportunity for Microsoft to develop better relationships with devs, use the data to optimize its AI in the cloud and even cherry pick some of the best developers in the world to create a pipeline of new talent and hires for the AI-route Microsoft will be going.
.. Acquiring GitHub could give Microsoft unique insights and relationship opportunities to onboard some of the best developers in the world.
.. GitHub has “27 million software developers working on 80 million repositories of code,” according to Bloomberg.
That’s 27 million of the most valuable minds on the planet. What can full access to these repositories and people do for how Microsoft understand talent in the software developer vertical?.. Presumably coupled with the data of LinkedIn, this kind of information can help train Microsoft’s AI and its ability to acquire the right people to build it’s assault on AI in the cloud and the future.
.. In the world of tech, you don’t want your average employee to be necessarily 33 years OLD. This is exactly the sort of reason Microsoft will acquire GitHub.
.. and it’s pretty much recognized many developers do their best work in their mid to late 20s (since the field is so dynamic).
What do “Pro” users want?
Some assertions you can read on the Internet seem out of touch with a company which made the glaring mistake of building a machine without a floppy, released a lame mp3 player without wireless and less space than a Nomad, tried to revolutionize the world with a phone without a keyboard, and produced an oversized iPhone which is killing the laptop in the consumer market.
.. What makes them stand out is that they are bolder, dare I say, more courageous than others, to the point of having the courage to use the word courage to justify an unpopular technical decision.
.. Having said that, us pros are generally conservative: we don’t update our OS until versions X.1 or X.2, we need all our tools to be compatible, and we don’t usually buy first-gen products, unless we self-justify our new toy as a “way to test our app experience on users who have this product”.
The Great Criticism Of The 2016 Macbook Pro is mainly fueled by customers who wanted something harder, better, faster, stronger (and cheaper) and instead they got a novel consumer machine with few visible Pro improvements over the previous one and some prominent drawbacks.
Experiment, but not on my lawn
If I could ask Apple for just one thing, it would be to restrict their courage to the consumer market.
.. But when Apple rebrands this Air as a Pro, real pros get furious, because that machine clearly isn’t for them. And this time, to add more fuel to the fire, the consumer segment gets furious too, since it’s too expensive, to be exact, $400 too expensive.
.. The explosion of the iOS App Store has not been a coincidence. It’s the combination of many factors, one of which is a high number of developers and geeks using a Mac daily, thanks to its awesomeness and recent low prices.