GitHub was relatively independent in that hosting git repositories was the only product that it sold and it didn't clearly favor any sort of tech stack. Now, MS says that they will not remove any of the existing functionality, but their press release did hint that they would add features to make it easier to launch apps onto MS platforms like Azure.
The economics were aligned with the customers. The whole business model was based on paying for private services using the same great tooling that was available for open source projects. People developed familiarity with open source and naturally clamored for the same tooling within companies. It was a loss leader of sorts.
Now the economic incentives are different. This would be true if Google acquired Github or if Amazon or Facebook or Twitter or any other company acquired it. Since it's not a standalone company, the parent company optimizing for greatest comprehensive profits will make decisions that are not always optimal if GitHub were standalone.
I'm pretty sure that the economics were aligned with getting bought out by someone. Upselling people who used the free product was not making them profitable and they weren't on the path to profitable.
The GitHub story is complex. There was a time years ago when they were profitable: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-... They and Sidekiq were the poster children of bootstrapped profitable businesses around open source. Something very clearly changed (most likely raising a boatload from VC firms and the ensuing perils) that flipped the situation.
Sure, but it isn’t profit motive that I think we should be concerned about in this case. Its the entire space in which GitHub exists is now radically different. Until the buyout, they were an independent company who hosted software repos. Now they are owned by a company who has many many many different interests and ms has a tendency to use most of their various software projects to feed into their own proprietary ecosystem.
There are many ways this might be problematic, all of which are obviously just speculation. I’m just trying to say, an enormous part of the software ecosystem is currently in a really precarious spot and we might be wise to consider and work on some alternatives just to give ourselves some wiggle room should ms decide to behave in ways we’ve seen them behave so many times in the past.
And then you will be able to base future decisions on fact instead of fear...of course this only works so far. There are obviously some things you really SHOULD be afraid of.
I am just starting to get annoyed by the typical self help advice like "Take risks", "Do what you fear the most". There are people who succeed that way but for plenty of people it doesn't work not so well. Unfortunately you only hear from the former group.
If support volume grows, there are three options: 1.) hire more staff 2.) keep staffing levels the same and force workers to take on more for the same pay or 3.) look at why support volume is growing and a) fix some avoidable reasons that require support ( small fixes in UX can go a long way ) , b) automatically solve some of the support issues ( improved documentation ), and c) have the support staff build themselves better tools so they can more efficiently handle the support volume rise.
If you are an owner, #3 will not only improve your products, but also likely to make your entire company much more valuable over time. If the staff are also owners or there is a system in place such that the staff benefits when the owners benefit, they will likely be on board for #3 as well. If #3 is not sufficient enough to provide support, then hiring should be done.
How do the employees feel about it? I’d bet a lot of money they’re in the top 5% retention among tech companies. Also they’re probably pretty happy to avoid the constant churn and failed projects of working in a company desperately chasing hypergrowth.
I imagine customers are pretty happy too knowing that they aren’t at risk of the company being flipped and the product discontinued or bloated in order to attract the next order of magnitude growth from corporate buyers who will themselves never use the product.
Your last sentence is the most laughably ironic since the entire VC game is to extract value from the energy and drive of young people with the promises of Facebook riches which will only ever materialize for a vanishingly small number of individuals, especially amongst the rank and file.
It's ironic is because Basecamp is the anti-VC tech company. They have better work-life balance, more modest ambitions, and less buzzword-worthy tech than the prototypical SV company. Assuming this is about hoodwinking some of the best-treated employees in tech shows goes against everything they've been preaching for the last 15 years.
About stuff off the shelf: I bought Focus Pep (https://www.amazon.com/Addrena-Stimulants-Boosting-Dietary-S...) a year ago or so off Amazon (I believe they are only sold through Amazon). Well, they helped me tremendously. I would take them minutes after I would wake up and I would then consequently have a want and go for a three mile run every day of the week. Then I would go to several of my classes and be focused to the dot. You could even say, I felt I was in a confident "flow" state when I took them. I ended having an all time best sleep schedule, since I took them in the morning so by nighttime I was so exhausted I would fall asleep early and wake up early. But the period when I took them, I would get sweaty easily, my entire being would be jittery, and I would not feel hungry throughout the day. I eventually got off them because I didn't feel natural and at ease, I always had an anxious need to do something. Though now that I'm not on them, I'm more prone to: being sad, overthinking about things, having trouble falling asleep and getting out of bed, not having a want to exercise, etc.
Try getting your hands on the tyrosine and the bacopa individually. Those two can be very useful. I take both.
The Vitamin B12 is potentially interesting; I have that in a spray form (on my table right here actually) which I'm trying to remember to take in the morning.
The caffeine is likely added as "energy sugar", ie to give the product a noticeable boost. Caffeine does work, but the toll it takes (and its predominantly psychological effect) is well known.
The Guarana seed extract, Bitter Orange Fruit Powder, DMAE, White Willow Bark, and Huperzine-A I can't comment at all about, but have been filed away.
The Carnitine and Choline I can't remember about right now... I think those are interesting, but I haven't properly tested my reaction to those just yet.
I'm guessing the pepper was added to increase absorption (it's supposed to rev the gut up and help digestion, and not in a bad way, but everyone works differently and sometimes this plan backfires).
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When it comes to natural health, getting all the compounds individually and then figuring out the doses you need generally has the best effect.
This also means you shard your requirements between a bunch of different suppliers, so when one decides to go switch to a cheaper upstream and a week later you go "hangonaminute" and start suspecting your supplements as the reason your brain felt like it went out to lunch... well you can just switch the single compound. Comparatively, if you shop around different suppliers for a product you don't seem to react great to, you might find you eventually go "wait, what... how..." once you finally find the one supplier that prepares the product such that it _actually works_. (Don't forget these two. They happen to me more often than I would like. :<)
This is generally more expensive (agh, so expensive...) but the results are worth it. I have quite a few issues (anxiety, cognition/problem-solving, mood, memory, stamina, nervous system, ...) and, well, the only reason I'm not 100% on top of my game is because I can't afford to take more than I'm taking right now (which ironically is the reason I don't have the mental consistency to get a job at this point xD). The products do work.
It's a lot like RAM. You notice it when you're not on it. I think the most obvious effect is humor... while on it, I'm quicker to see an opportunity for a joke. I assume it applies for finding breakthroughs faster.
Not sure why I got downvoted. I was the first comment and just trying to clarify which site the submitter was talking about (since he said "delicious.com").
"That means that what Amazon is really looking for is something else: that special something."
Massive tax breaks and giveaways. That's all this is about. It's a dog and pony show to see who will fork up the most to buy in to the delusion that it will pay off somehow.
That's what I suspect. Ask for all these things, and then wait for states and municipalities to say "Well, we don't have all of those, but here are a massive tax breaks in return".
It's sad watching cities fall over themselves to give Amazon (a half a trillion dollar company) a handout. Handouts no one can afford.
> (but where cities take the hit if the company town fails)
As a country [1], states [2], and many municipalities [3], we're very much insolvent as it relates to future obligations. Could we please stop supporting reckless behavior making it worse?
I suspect having a good talent pool, good infrastructure, and a responsive city government is worth more to the company than a few billion dollars in tax breaks.
This is a very bad idea .. there is no need for so many people to sit in one place and terrible for housing and commute. Amazon should come up with a better idea .. this is so not like Amazon.
Isn’t it more efficient for cities to have density like this? For example, you could triple the city busses to a specific location during work hours, a many-to-one relationship rather than many-to-many.
Only if affordable housing is enabled through policy. Otherwise Amazon is just creating a company town bubble within a town, driving up housing costs with the salaries they pay their workers.
I hope they flip the table, declare all proposals inadequate and build their own damn town. Negotiate directly with a state or the feds for land and do everything the way they want it.
If Musk can die on Mars, Bezos can damn well own a county.
Cute idea, but they've said their #1 priority is to be somewhere where talent wants to live, ideally complementary with Seattle:
> “Not everybody wants to live in the Northwest,” Wilke said. “It’s been terrific for me and my family, but I think we may find another location allows us to recruit a different collection of employees.”
Newville is a great place to live. Brand new infrastructure, good schools, and the kind of stores that cater to People Like Us. Sure, it's not the most exciting sort of place, but it's great for kids and families. And Big City is only two hours away, easily close enough when you want something different.
Right, but if Amazon pre-selects from a menu of the former, then cause a competitive bidding war for tax breaks from compliant cities then that's even better from Amazon's perspective isn't it? I personally disagree with the approach, but I would guess that's why the search was publicized.
And what is particularly galling about Amazon is they essentially pay no taxes. Since 2008, Amazon has paid $1.8B in income tax while Walmart has paid $64B [1]. So they're basically leeches demanding public services while contributing virtually nothing. As someone whose name I've forgotten said, the fundamental question surrounding silicon valley / SV type companies is how do you run a country when a company with $0.5T market cap / Fortune #12 essentially pays no taxes. Who pays for roads/fire services/schools.
Do the thousands of employees contribute economic benefit, as well as taxes, to Seattle or other cities?
It's absurd to think that there is no tax money being injected into the city simply because the corporate tax collected is low. They are spending their profits! Some of it in Seattle, and in other places they have physical presence on wages, real estate, etc.
Honestly you need to explain your premise that they contribute nothing... it's illogical. Where is the money going?
Why are "taxes" the only way citizens of a community can prosper? Do wages not count? If they do count, would you like to argue that Amazon is not paying wages to thousands of employees?
Do those employees pay taxes? Taxes aside, are the wages themselves beneficial?
One final point: "tax breaks" in and of themselves seem silly to rail against, like a shareholder being upset at "discounts".
Is your contention that a city giving any tax breaks will see less tax revenue as a result of Amazon coming into their city than if they didn't? Surely it's a question of how much no?
It's a prisoners dilemma - if no cities offer tax breaks, then Amazon likely still chooses a site in the US, and we all benefit from better balanced gov't budgets (or if there is enough incoming flow - we could lower tax rates in a fiscally responsible way - imagine that). If some cities defect, then well it breaks down to forgoing taxes and public budgets get harder to meet. Federal grant programs should look hard at cities applying for funding who may have given up local tax revenue to attract private corporations.
I dispute the claim that, on net, they would be "giving up" tax revenue. Or at least, the particulars matter.
Above some threshold, which can still be very low, they are going to get massive amounts of tax revenue, aside from the fact that wages, jobs, and citizens paying taxes will increase.
You might dispute this, but I don't see any numbers or qualifiers with anyone saying "tax breaks", in and of themselves are always on balance, whatever the specific details, worse than not having the companies be there.
There are lots of debates on the correct form of taxes anyways. Corporate taxes of non-trivial rates seem pointless to me, or.. detrimental actually. Property tax abatements? No different from a landlord giving rent deferrals to a whale tenant. It can be a very practical choice
Politicians' incentives not being aligned with long term goals of a city? Yes.. that is a problem. But still. The right choice could very well be massive tax breaks, even among those of differing political philosophies.
Suppose no cities offer tax breaks and Amazon grumpily decides to establish a second headquarters anyway wouldn't the tax revenue in that be higher as a nation than if one city offers breaks?
I sort of agree only on corporate tax breaks - pragmatically there is little point keeping them so high that most international corporations keep their profits offshore. I'd favor lowering corporate overseas rates, but only in combination with increased enforcement against tax avoidance schemes. But to me thats an unrelated to local city/state tax breaks given to corporations.
At the end of the day a lot of this seems like sort of an accounting question.
Since Amazon uniquely doesn't earn much profit, preferring to invest / spend as much of their revenue as possible, one could argue that there is an opportunity cost to collecting more money from Amazon in taxes vs leaving it to them to spend how they see fit. The cost is whatever alternative use they would place on that money... more employees hired, higher wages / benefits, more R&D, more capital expenditure, more construction, who knows.
Or course, in every one of those cases, there would likely be taxes involved anyways...
We do know. Taxes are already fairly low in the US. Kansas ran a broad scale experiment with dramatically lowering state taxes - the results indicate that some magic growth is not unlocked. My conclusion is that cities are just giving up local budget balance for little benefit.
Thank you for articulating this, @PKop... All of this negative sentiment around Amazon's impacts in Seattle and now HQ2 are missing the strikingly obvious benefits of having a top-notch employer in town.
Good jobs are the lifeblood of any community, and Amazon has provided them in spades in Seattle in a way that is far from extractive. They buy land and build on it and have transformed South Lake Union from a dead, dangerous warehouse district into a thriving neighborhood in ten years time. [1]
Almost all of the "problems" that Seattle faces due to Amazon's presence are problems that hundreds of towns would gladly take in exchange for the tens of thousands of high-end jobs that would bolster their community. [2]
There are so many communities across the US that have much bigger problems. Like lack of jobs, population loss, budget shortfalls, unsustainable public pension benefits, opiate epidemics.
For many, giving up some taxes from a company that isn’t currently there is a no brainer.
Since our current system uses taxes from both employees and companies, it should be obvious that taxing employees alone doesn't cover our bills.
Wages by themselves are not beneficial because cities and countries require money to build/maintain public works.
The history of cities giving tax breaks to attract business and that resulting in a net positive outcome for the city is very very slim. See eg any economist (except those paid for by sports teams) that's covered this.
Actually, Washington state taxes revenue not profit. It's a terrible system but Amazon is certainly dodging paying taxes while running a vast amount of their business out of Seattle.
This might not be as big a part of their calculation as you think. Homegrown companies like Microsoft and Boeing avoid paying tax by incorporating in different states.
