If Google Code succeeded, it’s hard to imagine that Google would not have tried to monetize it someday.
This also reminds me of Google’s (also initial) position on Chrome vis-a-vis Firefox: create a product “not trying to make money, or whatever” but just to limit the market share of a competitor.
"If Google Code succeeded, it’s hard to imagine that Google would not have tried to monetize it someday."
Google code did succeed in that sense. It had hundreds of thousands of 30-day active projects, and some insane market share of developers.
I don't honestly remember if it was even shrinking when we decided to stop taking in new projects.
I doubt we would have monetized it directly (IE sell an enterprise version) - the entire market for development tools is fairly small.
In 2022 it was ~5 billion dollars, and future estimates keep getting revised downwards :).
CAGR has been about 10-14% in practice, sometimes less.
I don't remember if it's still true, but most of that 5 billion dollars was going to Atlassian (80% at one point).
Now, if you project backwards to 2006, and compare it to other markets google could be competing in, you can imagine even if you got 100% of this segment it would not have actually made you a ton directly.
Indirectly, eh, my guess is you still make more off the goodwill than most other things.
It's actually fairly rare to make any significant money at development tools directly.
Nowadays, the main source even seems to be trying to sell AI and productivity, rather than tools.
It seems highly likely that a successful Google Code would be used as an onramp to Google Cloud. IOW, indirect monetization so it likely would still have a generous free component.
Yeah exactly, it is extremely easy to imagine this, because when Github was acquired by Microsoft in 2018, Diane Greene (who headed Google Cloud at the time) commented on this
It sounds like Google would have paid some amount of billions for Github, but not the amount that Microsoft paid
I personally don't think Google would have tried to monetize Google Code, even if it had 10x or even 50x the users that it eventually had. (And I say that having worked at Google, and on Google Code briefly!)
I think it made more sense as complementary to another product (which in some sense explains a big problem with developing products at Google)
Relatedly, it is hard to understand how operating Google Code in a manner “never trying to win”, “not trying to make money, or whatever” and “just to prevent … a monoculture” was in the best interests of Google the corporation and its shareholders
If Google Code succeeded, it’s hard to imagine that Google would not have tried to monetize it someday.
This also reminds me of Google’s (also initial) position on Chrome vis-a-vis Firefox: create a product “not trying to make money, or whatever” but just to limit the market share of a competitor.
The less flattering term for this in the context of anticompetitive behavior is “dumping”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)