As an idea, do you think an enterprise only Git host would work.
Say annual contracts start at 100k minimum and everyone gets a dedicated support engineer.
You get your own rack. None of this degraded shared capability nonsense.
Does that seem like a solid business ?
I think so, but, only if you differentiate in the privacy angle (think Proton vs GMail) and this is similar to how most enterprise GIT offerings work, too. The risk is GitHub offering to existing orgs who are already on Office 365 a self-hosted version (I think they already do). So, this business model will fail in the SWOT analysis itself. Still, there might be some looking to exit MS office ecosystem, it might make more sense for them.
It’s a dream, I don’t have the money to do it.
But it could work as a franchise model too, maybe I just refer your company to an affiliate located in your country of choice.
For example, most European clients would pick German locations.
If I was in the EU I’d be applying for a grant to build on the idea. Their’s no rational reason for European companies to fully trust Microsoft to act in good faith.
No. You'd be competing with multiple mature cloud services plus Github Enterprise Cloud/self-hosted plus multiple open source options.
I don't need or want a dedicated support engineer for my VCS, I need it to integrate with all the bullshit products I already have, tick off the compliance and governance checkboxes for the suits, give me controls so SWEs do less dumb shit and above all, not be something I have to think about except at contract renewal time.
I'm just not going to trust a rando to run all that for me and get it right, especially not at that price point.
Is that Bitbucket?
Both GitLab and Bitbucket still offer free repos for hobbyists.
What I'm thinking of is a company that exclusively caters to the enterprise.
You get a support engineer and they help on everything, migration, CI/CD, hosting, etc.
Nothing goes down without a solid 3 page write up.