The fact that the account was just started 1 week ago suggests to me that Github had been preventing squatting on the account until it was official.

You are right, I tried with Microsoft: http://i.imgur.com/PJiOy.png

https://github.com/microsoft/

Microsoft is on github. Github should let these teams setup an organization under Microsoft as a pointer.

https://github.com/microsoft-dpe

https://github.com/Microsoft-Interop

https://github.com/WindowsAzure

That would require these various teams at Microsoft to act as if they were a single organization. This has historically been difficult for teams at Microsoft.

Right? Apparently they can't even agree on whether or not they want caps or dashes in their organization names.

I'm working on this. And, yes, it's difficult.

What is funny is that some of the same engineers are on all these github accounts.

Indeed but it does not change DevX101's point. Also it is strange they did not request the microsoft account

This Github account is definitely run by Googlers (Will Norris and Ilya Grigorik). It was announced on one of the internal mailing lists a few days ago as a companion to code.google.com for things like rubygems, not as a replacement of any kind.

any chance they (or github, or someone else) will enable bidirectional syncing of changes? It'd be nice to see 2 or 3 of the ones out there support not just importing, but also methods for automating the syncing of changes, especially if that means that I can do a github pull request and it automagically becomes a branch or patch file sent to an svn-hosted project.