My heart sank a little when I saw this appear on my profile last night. I don't understand which demographic this is meant to target or what the point of it is, I just can't think of a single reasonable use case for it.
The demographic it's targeting is people who use GitHub for daily work professionally, not volunteer open source maintainers (just as the demographic Slack targets is people who are paid to have Slack open 8 hours a day, not community chat rooms, and their product decisions make more sense in that context). But even volunteer open source maintainers are likely to find "On vacation until mm/dd" useful.
> I just can't think of a single reasonable use case for it.
MS didn't acquire GitHub because they cared at all about the technology. It was the exact same strategy as LinkedIn. It's all about tracking us, the developer community, and keeping their finger on the pulse of where things are going. Generating more click event data to further profile your tastes for future commercial use by Microsoft. What other possible reason could there be?
MS cares about developer mindshare. Through GitHub they have access to the worlds largest software developer social network (well it's almost a social network). The large number of open source projects on the site provide a moat and a network effect.
I can hazard a reasonable guess based on my observation of various executive life forms and, oddly, The Office. I obviously do not have data to back it up, but random clicks seem to find random non-code related items on GitHub ( I think HN had pizza recipe example kinda drove that point further for me ). From this I can only gather that someone decided that GitHub should be more.. fun, social place where you interact, interface and collaborate in real time. Just be happy no one announced they are moving everything to a semi-public blockchain.
