🔗 Why GitHub Actually Won

If you want a very short read, here is the quick version of why I believe GitHub won and why you're probably using the site to this day.

I can boil it down to exactly two reasons that happened to resonate with each other at the perfect frequency.

1. GitHub started at the right time
2. GitHub had good taste

All four GitHub cofounders had flops both before and after GitHub. Chris and PJ couldn't quite make FamSpam work before GitHub, Tom and I couldn't quite make Chatterbug explode after GitHub. I think both of these ventures had good taste and great product, but it wasn't the right place or time or market or whatever for them to become GitHub level.

At the time GitHub was starting, distributed open source version control tools were starting to get useful, solid and adopted and there was nobody around to seriously (much less commercially) host them. Big hosts didn't care and smaller players weren't serious.

Furthermore, the players (Sourceforge, Google Code, etc) who eventually did care, after seeing Git and GitHub rising in popularity, simply had no taste. They could never have competed with a developer tools company whose cofounders were all product-focused open source software developers.

We cared about the developer experience and had the creativity to throw away assumptions about what it was supposed to be and build how we wanted to work. Everyone else tried to build what they thought they could sell to advertisers or CTOs.

That's why GitHub won.

Now that that's out of the way, if you're interested in some storytelling, let me lead you down the path of how some of this actually unfolded from the inside.

continue reading on blog.gitbutler.com

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