GitHub

The thing about GitHub is that it's simultaneously the most important website in the modern economy and the most aesthetically bankrupt. Microsoft paid $7.5 billion for this beige rectangle of corporate mediocrity, and honestly, they got exactly what they deserved. Every time I land on github.com, I'm struck by how a platform that hosts the source code for literally everything—from Tesla's autopilot to your nephew's Minecraft mod—presents itself with all the visual sophistication of a mid-tier SaaS company's landing page. The rotating carousel of corporate logos (American Airlines! Mercedes-Benz! Vodafone!) screams "enterprise sales deck" rather than "the beating heart of open source collaboration." It's like if the Library of Alexandria decided to rebrand itself as a WeWork.

The strategic positioning here is actually quite brilliant in its ruthlessness, even if the execution feels focus-grouped to death. GitHub has achieved something most platforms can only dream of: true supplier power. They've become the default repository for human knowledge work, which means they can serve you a landing page that looks like it was designed by committee and you'll still sign up because, well, where else are you going to go? GitLab? Bitbucket? Please. The "AI-powered developer platform" messaging is pure 2024 buzzword bingo, but the underlying moat is real—network effects, switching costs, and the gravitational pull of 100+ million repositories create a competitive dynamic that's almost unassailable.

What's particularly insidious about GitHub's current incarnation is how it's managed to corporatize the commons without anyone really noticing. The homepage copy about "collaboration endures" and "building software that advances humanity" reads like it was written by someone who has never actually contributed to an open source project. Meanwhile, GitHub Copilot—their AI code completion tool—is literally trained on the open source code that millions of developers freely contributed to the platform, then sold back to them for $10/month. It's a masterclass in platform capitalism: aggregate the free labor, add some machine learning pixie dust, and suddenly you're not a code host, you're an "AI-powered developer platform." The fact that they lead with Duolingo "boosting developer speed by 25%" tells you everything about who they're actually optimizing for.

The user experience reflects this tension between community and commerce. GitHub's core functionality—browsing repositories, reading code, tracking issues—remains elegantly simple, largely unchanged from the pre-Microsoft era. But the homepage experience feels like you're being funneled through a enterprise software sales process. "Launch a full, cloud-based development environment in seconds" and "Manage projects from your mobile device"—this isn't how actual developers talk about their workflow. The whole thing reeks of product managers trying to expand total addressable market by making GitHub appeal to "business users" who don't understand that the platform's power comes from its technical specificity, not its corporate-friendly feature bloat.

Here's the thing though: GitHub works, and that's the most damning part of this whole review. For all my complaints about the aesthetically bankrupt homepage and the cynical monetization of open source contributions, I'll probably commit code to a GitHub repository within an hour of publishing this review. The platform has achieved something like infrastructural inevitability—it's not good because it's well-designed or ethically pure, it's good because it's where the code lives. Microsoft understood this when they bought it: sometimes the best business model isn't building something beautiful or revolutionary, it's buying the thing everyone already depends on and slowly extracting rent. The fact that they can serve you this corporate gruel of a website and still maintain their position as the center of the software universe is testament to just how powerful that position really is.