Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: 5 Things You Need To Know About $7.5B GitHub Deal

What About GitHub?

Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella took to CNBC on Monday to talk about the company's latest planned acquisition that is taking the developer world by storm and sending the company's stock soaring to an all-time high on Monday morning: Microsoft said it would buy GitHub in a deal worth $7.5 billion. Nadella pledged that Microsoft, a company that started out building developer tools, will keep GitHub true to its independent, "developer-first" value proposition, while also touching upon the company's integration plans with GitHub.

Here are excerpts from Nadella's CNBC interview on its planned GitHub purchase.

What's the strategic benefit of GitHub for Microsoft?

When you think about what's happening in the broader world, every business is a software business, whether its precision medicine or agriculture, or personalized education or banking, it's being built by developers. A piece of data from LinkedIn says a non-tech hiring of software development is growing steadily in the double-digits, 25 percent greater than software engineering growth in tech, so that speaks to world that is going to be there going forward. From a secular basis, developers are going to be required everywhere. And that's really the strategic rationale for it.

Where will you keep the platform separate to maintain a neutral repertoire with the developer community?

Microsoft has heritage here -- we were a developer tools company first and now we are all in on open source and that’s what really brings us together with GitHub. We want to operate it as an open platform for any language and any framework, whether it’s the cloud or on the client, and really serve the developers with a [software as a service] SaaS that everyone requires, just like we have done for knowledge workers on office 365.

How quickly is Microsoft going to make visible changes to GitHub to bolster developer confidence as rivals take advance of this deal to encourage developers to export projects to their platforms?

With the community in GitHub, it's most important to stay true to the core developer-first ethos that GitHub has always had. Nat Friedman, is going to be the CEO post close, came to Microsoft from Xamarin, and he's a veteran of open source. Chris Wanstrath, the [current] CEO of GitHub and I have discussed a lot around the fundamental ethos of the company going forward will remain the same and we will operate it independently. It will be an open platform, and I think most developers out there will judge us by our recent actions and our actions going forward and we will have to earn their trust every day. We're excited because at our core, Microsoft is a developer company, so this is something that comes very naturally.

How many ties should we expect to see between GitHub and Azure, and other Microsoft tools?

In fact, already there is some amazing integrations between our tools and GitHub. Just a couple of weeks ago at our developer conference, we showed a lot of the integrations of the workflows between Azure and GitHub. The most important thing though, is it's not just about Azure. We welcome every cloud provider to integrate with GitHub in order to be able to reach the community and give our members the choice of any cloud, as well as an IoT or mobile platform. For us, you will continue to see us integrate but again stay true to what is the core ethos and value proposition of GitHub.

Will there be more sizable purchases to be expected, or will Microsoft slow down to integrate GitHub?

Overall, we always look for growth opportunities. If there is a secular market that is going to grow, we will always be attracted to that, but more importantly, we need to have a real position that we can contribute something unique to that market. In this case, being a developer-first company from the very start gives us confidence we can bring real value to the developer community. What we've done with companies like LinkedIn gives us confidence that we can in fact acquire, grow, and have these communities thrive, and that's what will look for. It's not like we'll speed it up or slow it down. We will go by three criteria; is it a growing market, can we add value, and can we integrate it well.