fishing for githubs

I doubt that Trumponomics is driving a US manufacturing business boom.

Right now it all seems to be more related to technology futures, banking and probably defence in its widest sense.

Even some of that is almost hard to believe given the latest Facebook news about another 60 companies having had access to that dubious Facebook client data.

Oops.

But right now I'm intrigued by the latest move of Microsoft who, after a week of rumours, bought the Github source code management system for around $7.5bn via a share swap. Some estimates put Github's market value at closer to $2bn, so the Microsoft markup (even with its recently increased share price) is pretty steep.

It must mean Microsoft have a great idea. Something more than melding their own Visual Studio developer works with the equivalent facilities available in Github. And the idea must heavily use the collaborative capabilities inherent in Github. World domination of application development? Nerdy but an interesting attempt to play catch up.

British readers are already seasoned to the Github's dubious name.

No, it doesn't stand for anything, instead it was originally an in-joke by Torvalds Linux, who liked the connotations of the improper English expression and named his own open source Linux code management after it.

Nowadays a huge proportion of the applications developer market use it for collaborative code and document management, irrespective of the target platform. But these folk are one removed from the consumer of the services.

So it's like we can see Microsoft going overtly technical again. An implication could be that they missed the boat with something? Remember Blackbird, when they missed the Internet/HTML by trying to impose their own Object Linking and Embedding?

So we are expected to wonder what this next new thing will be?

Expect a blend of a new technical evangelism about to spin up, alongside an ongoing pac-man swallowing by ever larger fish.