Reposting my comment about this from r/node/

This is fascinating to me. Github could never have done this without Microsoft, and developers would never have adopted this if Microsoft did it.

Currently NPM (the company) has a business model which relies mainly on selling to enterprise customers (surely not all their business, but most likely the bulk).

Microsoft is the best poised company in the market to eat their lunch, because enterprise is Microsoft’s core competency. Think what you will of the company and its relevancy today, but they have deep experience selling to enterprise, and preexisting relationships with many enterprises.

What does Microsoft hope to get from this though? Surely its a small line of business, and wont make Github all that much money. Github has a relationship primarily with individual developers first and foremost, that is their target market. Those devs influence their employer’s decision to pay for GitHub because the devs want to use what they’re familiar with. So that relationship with individual devs is really Github’s bread and butter.

Well, I think thats exactly what Microsoft hopes to get; that virtuous cycle of making a product that is loved and widely adopted by individuals and then championed by by those individuals within their organizations. Similar to Slack’s growth model, and also Zoom’s.

Its no secret Microsoft is trying to win back the common developer. At a time when apple is fumbling on caring about devs (re: escape key), and AWS has become the default for cloud production, there is a real opportunity to be the company that makes development better for devs. If Microsoft ever wants to succeed in Cloud, they need to win back developers by having services which are genuinely better and friendlier to use. If they can become the default choice for developers in certain areas (VSCode, Github) and then make it dead simple to integrate with their cloud services, thats a compelling reason for individuals to use their services. And if its actually better (clearly no one is a delighted by the AWS interface) then Azure could become some folks preference for their personal work. And with those services being available where your company already hosts its code and does it developing, Github, then all the better.

Microsoft made a very smart move acquiring Github, and I think they will take great care not to upset the common developer as that is the lifeblood of this whole cycle.

Note, I said common developer. There is a lot of mistrust of Microsoft among the Hacker News and silicon valley crowd. There are definitely valid concerns held by folks at the upper percentile of developers, who tend to both take a longer view and are more cynical (to put it nicely). But thats not the vast majority of devs. Most devs don’t work at FAANG, or live somewhere on the west coast. Most work at smaller companies around the world. Github/Microsoft only need to appeal to most devs.

I wasn’t sure what Microsoft would do to capitalize on their Github acquisition. But this is a great start. There is a lot of drama around npm the company, and their interests are no longer aligned with the common developer. There really are problems there that Github can solve.

GitHub can afford to prioritize the common dev with Microsoft’s help. GitHub already has a great reputation in the open source community, and they are certainly a safer bet for longevity and keeping your package publicly available than npm.

Anyway, I’ve been reading too much Stratechery it seems!

TLDR; This is npm the company’s current business model. Microsoft is way better at enterprise than almost anyone, certainly npm the company. npm’s interests are no longer aligned with common devs, but GitHub’s certainly are and Microsoft is willing to pay to make sure it can stay that way.

Also note: NPM is really at least 3 things. The package registry, which is a public database of all the packages in the JS ecosystem. The website frontend to find packages. The npm cli, which is an open source project. And lastly npm, Inc the company, founded in 2014, who foots the bill for the public registry. I love the npm ecosystem and the people who build the tools, but Im not so hot on the company, since they are essentially rent seeking.

This has potential to be really awesome for enterprise development. My previous employer had a number of internal registry systems for docker, pip, maven, and npm. Getting all of that in one and integrated with your source code could be great

What no Python?