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Most big cap tech stocks seem a bit richly valued by classical measures.

I'd love to see more discussion on the acquisition valuation here.

Considering that Github had sales of around 200M last year and is losing money, the 7.9B is a pretty rich multiple.

Sure Github is a nice fit for Microsoft (more perhaps than something like Minecraft is).

Still, this seems more like mindshare or perhaps defensive purchase.

Agreed - definite 'strategic' rationale for the purchase. Can't get there by any conventional valuation method. But to put things another way, do you believe that having Github as a Microsoft property (or the insurance that buys) is worth 1% of the company? Not too hard to get to big numbers when we're talking about a 3/4 trillion dollar company.

This one kind of feels like Skype, in that it felt like they overpaid there as well (I remember thinking that Silverlake had performed a masterful coup with Skype) ... only time will tell whether Github loses their mojo as in the Skype situation. I'm not a skype user, but my general sense is that the service has been completely eclipsed by everything else in that space.

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