Microsoft's bad obsession is showing up in shabby services and slipshod software. Here's proof
If you can't bother to keep GitHub running, why should we bother with you?
OPINION It's been another shabby week for Microsoft, and a shabbier one for its users. We learnt that Windows 11's epic habit of trying to corral customers into paid-for Microsoft services just got worse with a low-rent trick. Remote Desktop got a bit more secure, which is good, but in a way that suggests not too much user testing took place. As for GitHub… GitHub got two helpings of Chef Redmondo's Special Sauce.
The first course is the signature dish of Microsoft's code cuisine, Pâté de Foul AI, in which AI is force-fed down our necks much as geese have tubes stuck down theirs to make Pâté de Foie Gras. This is not good news for the geese, but in GitHub's case it's not much good for Microsoft either. Its effusive over-offer is proving unsustainable and it has had to introduce rationing. It's all a bit of a mess, especially for a Big Tech outfit that claims intimate knowledge of developers and of AI.
The second course is less than gourmet. GitHub is turning up late and cold. One of GitHub's biggest fans, Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto, says that the platform is now so unreliable due to daily outages it can't be considered as safe for production. This is much more significant than it seems on the surface. Hashimoto is a five star code chef, serving up unusual yet delicious dishes in unlikely genres, such as terminal software with elegant and useful innovations.
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Hashimoto is also a huge fan of one of GitHub's less obvious, under-rated and critical roles, that of educational resource. Its use to train AI is controversial, but its use to train humans should be noisily celebrated. Open source can claim significance in part because it makes textbooks of techniques and solved problems that anyone can read. This is terrific for the health and growth of the talent we need to make progress in the digital realm — but only if those textbooks can be found, accessed and searched.
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GitHub is the global library for that. It's also the industry standard for collaboration, source control, and moving projects between organizations. Those who had to do such things before Git and GitHub existed will shudder at the remembered pain of those days, and if that was all GitHub did it would still be an essential service for everyone. It isn't. It is all those things and a pillar of digital culture as well. Whatever Microsoft thought it was buying when it bought GitHub, it was also buying that responsibility.
To be fair, it has mostly honored that. It hasn't absorbed and dismembered it, rolled it into a badly compromised component of some existing strategy, or sacked everyone and shut things down. None of these is an uncommon fate for a previously successful product post-acquisition. To date, GitHub has prospered, ostensibly on its own terms. Now, something tastes rotten.
When a previously reliable service becomes flaky, the reasons are lack of resources or the loss of knowledge. Give the right people the right tools and the right budget, and let them get on with it. Assuming there's enough money, this happens with the right management and it makes things work. It does not happen with the wrong management, in which case it is difficult or impossible to stop bad things happening. Bad things are happening in GitHub. QED, baby.
Bad management doesn't have to be the immediate management of a project or division, as structural rot can set in anywhere and make its way like a fungus up and down the org chart. There is certainly plenty of evidence that a pathological fixation on AI is appropriating resources and managerial mindspace with consequent opportunity costs and neglect elsewhere. You can sum up that business gibble-gabble in six words: Windows is an agentic operating system
Further proof that Microsoft is a long way from giving the right people the right tools is that it is encouraging the right people to leave the company, paying engineers to go away. Voluntary redundancy is a poisonous draught with a long and bitter aftertaste. It encourages the best people to go first, as they have the best chance of finding well-paid employment elsewhere. You're left with those who lack the talent or confidence in themselves, in an intellectually impoverished workplace, often with an increased workload and tasks for which they lack experience. They may not last long either.
Microsoft may actually believe that its own AI will pick up the slack. There's evidence that it believes this, and evidence it isn't true. Even the best AI in the world can't help you if you're asking the wrong questions and ignoring the right answer.
The pressure from outside to take those users away is building, with impeccably functional alternatives all across the stack and governments flicking lit matches into accelerants like digital sovereignty.
Letting GitHub get sick is a terrible advertisement for a company complacent about user confidence. The recipe doesn't taste good. One day, the only thing left on the menu may be toast. ®