When Microsoft said it would spend $7.5 billion buying GitHub, the company faced plenty of pushback. After all, this was a once fierce critic of open source buying the biggest repository for open source projects. Of course, Microsoft has been fixing its open-source reputation in recent years and GitHub was a way to build the company’s credentials.
But, how exactly has Microsoft’s acquisition gone? Well, during its Fiscal 2023 First Quarter earnings call, Microsoft reported that GitHub is going from strength to strength under its stewardship.
Specifically, the code hosting platform is now achieving annual recurring revenue of $1 billion. When Microsoft bought the company, GitHub was getting between $200 and $300 million in revenue. That was in 2018, so in just four years Microsoft has driven the platform to almost quadruple its earnings.
It is a similar story to the user base. At the time of its acquisition, GitHub was at around 28 million active users. That number is now a massive 90 million, an impressive number for what is such a tech-focused platform.
Success
Of course, the question is how much of this success is Microsoft’s work and how much is coming from the trajectory GitHub was on regardless. Probably a bit of both. Either way, Microsoft is happy to take the plaudits:
“Since our acquisition, GitHub is now at $1 billion annual recurring revenue and GitHub’s developer-first ethos has never been stronger,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said. “More than 90 million people now use the service to build software for any cloud, on any platform — up three times.”
Perhaps the best takeaway from Microsoft’s acquisition is that GitHub is still mostly the same. There were concerns Microsoft would transform the platform with paywalls for features and access. That hasn’t happened, with Microsoft willing to maintain the original nature of a free GitHub.
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