
If Github ends up selling itself one day, Microsoft will be the buyer (2014) - doener
https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/430871267881672704
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hoodoof
It's not prescience or genius..... almost no matter what happens, someone
somewhere predicted it was going to happen. And with the Internet, it's on
record so can be looked up.

Whenever there is a financial crisis, someone goes back and sees who predicted
these exact circumstances, which of course someone did because that's
statistics for you. But it doesn't make then a genius or prescient.

It just means they are the person who happened to guess what did actually
happen. And I tell ya, it aint hard to predict which of the big companies will
buy some other highly successful smaller company because there ain't that many
acquisitive really big tech companies.

If you want to look like a genius in the future, Tweet a few predictions about
random([amazon, google, microsoft]) will buy random([jetbrains, atlassian,
twitter]). No one will notice if it never happens but when it does you can
stand tall as a true crystal ball gazer who "really called it".

Here's when "The Simpsons" predicted the Trump Presidency.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXcYMvzZ7jk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXcYMvzZ7jk)
Same thing.

Here is when some other guy predicted - right here on HN - and way back in
2008 - that Google would buy github
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=262460](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=262460)
Now that guy is a genius! Oh wait now he wasn't, it was someone else who made
a different guess.

And when those aliens arrive.... you'd better believe there will be a long
queue of people lining up to take their title as "genius" and "prescient" and
"called it".

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ry4n413
linkedin employees say microsoft has largely left them alone since acquiring
them, so i'm going to assume they will do the same thing with github.

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chrisseaton
What’s the point in buying it, then?

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bausshf
Income?

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chrisseaton
But GitHub doesn't make a profit. They'd have to change it to make a profit.

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mankash666
The basecamp folks have always understood the "business" side of things just
as much as coding/tech.

While it may seem prescient, the telltale signs screaming Microsoft always
existed.

And if you're worried about GitHub's future, think back to Visual Studio code
and how one of the most hated software companies in the world built one of the
most love editors, open source none the less

~~~
_bxg1
Thing is, this was before Microsoft's whole momentum shift. Before they moved
Windows to git, before they launched VS Code, etc.

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TAForObvReasons
That "momentum shift" didn't happen overnight. No doubt the shift was under
way long before Nadella took the helm. Proper execution of the shift required
a new leader -- that is to say, if Ballmer wanted to make the shift it
wouldn't be credible while he was CEO.

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_bxg1
Out of curiosity I did some googling.

This tweet was made on the day Steve Ballmer left Microsoft, right on the
brink of the company's 180 in so many areas. Talk about calling it.

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hawski
Here are HN predictions:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Microsoft%20buy%20GitHub&sort=...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Microsoft%20buy%20GitHub&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=custom&type=comment&dateStart=0&dateEnd=1527811200)

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awat
My understanding is that this is more or less how Gary Vaynerchuk sky-rocketed
to the center of media through a similar(ish) comment about Facebook. Best of
luck!

~~~
kjksf
That and working 60hr a week for a decade or two.

~~~
awat
Absolutely but overnight successes tend to have that moment.

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linkmotif
Very nice, with solid rationale and everything.

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pouta
I hope that guy follows through his bet.

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mlthoughts2018
This makes me want to choose N medium-size startups and create 5^N Twitter
accounts, one account for each possible tweet series of predicted acquisitions
by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, or Microsoft.

At the end I’ll delete all the accounts but the one that was 100% accurate,
and use it to start my own data science election wonk website.

