This is Google solving Google-sized problems. I am afraid the rest of the world will look at this and say - "yeah we want to be like Google and adopt this". That is how Kubernetes took over the world.
Trying to understand why a developer would like to call an API to generate code rather than use a coding AI assistant within their editor? Genuinely curious.
* AI is good at hard (to human) tasks like explaining complex code but bad at easy (to human) tasks like counting C files in a codebase.
* AI is particularly effective at taking over repetitive work full of toil e.g., reviewing large PRs. As a result, it will allow more developers to focus on fun things like building new features.
* AI will increase the number of developers worldwide because it reduces the barrier to entry for programming.
* AI will reduce the fear involved in starting large-scale projects like migrating codebases from one framework/technology to another.
These are the most interesting numbers of all the things that Microsoft shared in its FY23Q1 earnings call.
Looking just at that 90M active users number - let us say the definition of active is a little wonky since we don't know which product gesture they qualify as a signal of active usage. Let us say that number is inflated by 100% (unlikely). It still comes down to 45M active users. This number is greater than the global developer population number estimated by many reputed analysts. Remember, this is not an e-commerce company; this is not a consumer social networking app; this is not a business productivity app that is useful for all information workers. This is a technical product meant for a technical audience (mostly developers). With that in mind, the 90M active users is a mind-boggling statistic.
In the freemium world, 2% is considered a decent conversion rate. Let us say GitHub has just half of that (1% conversion to paid) since their freemium is so good that people have fewer reasons to upgrade. This would mean they are generating $1B in revenue from 900K customers, which is again remarkable.
What started as a source control system is now developer productivity + developer collaboration + deployment orchestration + supply chain security, and the list goes on and on.
It would not be a stretch to say that GitHub is by far the most "touched" cloud-based developer tool/service in the world. Great job by the GitHub team. But also a huge credit to Microsoft for not just "leaving GitHub alone" but for recognizing its potential as their primary developer offering and pouring so much new investment into it. That could not have been easy for a company that was already a powerhouse of developer tooling with their existing tools to promote.
If software is eating the world, I must say GitHub is playing a massive role in building software's appetite.
I don't understand the argument that they analyzed all the code from their users, used it to train their service, and are now charging for the service.
Do people want to see ads instead?
Or would they be ok paying for Google search (another service trained by all the information we willingly volunteer to them)?
Copilot adds tremendous value and they are justified charging for it.