Different analytics are important at different stages of a company's development. A place like Microsoft might place little to no value in RT analytics most of the time. They tend to move too slowly to be able to do anything in real time. OTOH, a struggling startup trying to grow from 500 to 1000 users might look almost exclusively at the RT analytics.
Externally, Microsoft doesn't have a choice but take the matter seriously - enough negative press, and they'll have to respond, so this is not really surprising.
I'm really curious to find out how they handled this issue internally, though (as unlikely as it is for us to ever find out). Given the size of the company, and the often negative portrayal of it in the startup and other bleeding edge technology communities, I find it surprising to see anything like this make it into the public eye. It gives me hope for finding a cool core of hackers hiding in a dark corner somewhere, with free hand to do as they please and generally do fun, cool, stuff.
So, this investments signals a shift in focus. Up until now, github was a long term growth company, a much more stable (if slower growing) setup? Ie, they've shifted gears, more towards a hit or flop kind of scenario, where they have to get fairly big fairly quickly, even if the process means they're at a higher risk of permanently failing.
It doesn't look to me like the people who love and use github have been using it because it looks like it will be stable, and stick around for a while. They seem to have been won over by popularity effects and performance/cool tech factors.
So, if github fails, it may not really be as big of an issue. Github could fail as an investment or company, and still leave a running system behind, up as a non-profit even; the risk to its customers doesn't seem that big. And the potential rewards, depending on how they invest the money, can be really big. There's lots of good work they can still do, that everyone will benefit from.