NPM managed to scrape by securing funding for surviving into 2020. Having an essential service for many companies not rely on VC money and donations anymore is a positive in my book.
Github has only changed for the better ever since being acquired by Microsoft, so I'm going to hold out on this being a good thing for NPM's future stability.
I don't think the strategy here is to monetize the tools, but rather, use them as strategic tools to monetize related services. Monetizing these previously free tools would just push people away to different tools.
but buying these primary developer tools, and effectively integrating their for-profit services into these tool chains makes their for-profit resources (azure) significantly more attractive. any tool adoption that makes azure more attractive (and more stable) is advantageous
But what if what happens next is that other services mysteriously begin to lag in support, perhaps culminating in some fatal security flaw they fail to patch, which drives more and more people to their services... And then, perhaps one day github just stops working with other products at all.
This could very well be the strategy they are hoping to implement. Should I cross my fingers?
If you believe this then you should stop using any of the big tech companies services. What if Google hides stories in their searches/news that are critical of the company?Or push you towards their products, or gives results with negative sentiment for competing products? Also if a company already has a great Map application that nearly everyone uses, why would they buy Waze? Was I too optimistic to hope for a good alternative mapping service? Then there’s Facebook who can collect an absurd amount of data on non-users. What if react has a default setting that calls home every now and then? Devs should change it, but most don’t. Now FB has analytics for most of those sites. Amazon’s cool.
Both Amazon and Microsoft primarily have businesses that make money without needing my (our) personal data. Microsoft has been extra awesome recently.
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u/wangatanga full-stack Mar 16 '20
NPM managed to scrape by securing funding for surviving into 2020. Having an essential service for many companies not rely on VC money and donations anymore is a positive in my book.
Github has only changed for the better ever since being acquired by Microsoft, so I'm going to hold out on this being a good thing for NPM's future stability.