Report: Microsoft is thinking about splashing $10bn on Discord to slot it next to Skype, Mixer... Microsoft is apparently mulling snapping up Discord, an IRC-a-like-for-the-2020s popular with gamers, techies, and others, for a whopping $10bn. Discord, founded in 2015 and based in San Francisco, allows users to set up public and private chat servers, where people can talk to each other using using text, voice, and video, …
Because it's still better than Teams?
Ha Ha Ha...Oh wait you were being serious
Ever since moving to teams we have not used Skype for idiots..sorry, business , once
We have not missed to constant nagging, the 5% of CPU cycles and the awful user interface. The only benefit from SFB is for external phone calls.
Teams on the other hand has been constantly improved, features added and is one stop shop for team communications, incorporating groups, calendar management, chat, video conferencing. I am not saying it is perfect, and zoom is far more fun, but seriously Skype is a legacy dinosaur that needs killing off
Once upon a time Skype was really good and really useful.
How they managed to turn this success into
Skype was blown away by Zoom last year as the coronanvirus pandemic took hold.
Must rank as an amazing achievement in negative business strategy.
Of course when I say that Skype used to be good, I'm not talking about Skype for Business which was pants and trying to change the name to hide from people knowing it's pants hasn't made any difference.
Perhaps they could just find a backup tape of the Skype SW from the mid noughties and relaunch that.
M$ keeps buying these companies, but It doesn't seem to get that a big part of their success is that they were 3rd party solutions and lacked the arbitrary restrictions and interference that cripple most of M$/Sony/Nintendo's 1st party efforts. This is due in no small part that small companies can't survive the level of systemic incompetence, hubris, and greed that the majors can tolerate. So no real surprise that these projects wither or die after acquisition, it's like putting fresh water guppies in a salt water shark tank.
That said I totally get why a company like Skype was happy to run off with the paycheck, just not what pathological madness drives M$ and Sony to keep flushing billions down the toilet acquiring, ruining, and then closing beloved 3rd party products.
Buying Discord will bring them neither success, fortune, or goodwill. It will just make Slack jealous(and even less relevant, despite it's popularity).
If MS buy Discord they will change the UI with ever new release and loose users because of it. MS reputation for chat apps have not been good since they killed of MSN messenger and forced everyone over to Skype.
I am not actually Discord user but news of MS sniffing around it can't be good for its future.
I can't wait to find out how quickly Borkzilla will emasculate Discord's usefullness and destroy its user base before going sulking back into its corner, having still understood nothing about the Internet works.
Oh well, the beancounters are just going to have to prepare to write off another ten billion. They're used to it.
And if it follows the same path as they did with Skype and MSN messenger?
"Microsoft would like to announce Discord for Business will be your new corporate chat app, replacing Microsoft Teams, which will close down at the end of the year..."
Who's the one taking crazy pills here, me or them?
Unlikely; if anything, I imagine they'll position it as "Teams for Business and enterprise, DIscord for the rest."
The two products have a startling amount of similarity, function wise.
If it does go through, one can only hope that they do like they did with Github and leave it largely alone.
Big company buys little company. Over a relatively short amount of time, big company forces out the people who made small company. The energy and ideas that made small company are no longer around, thus the only people working on small company's product are those who are have no personal investment in it and have no idea why small company's product was so successful. Soon, big company ruined the small company's product.
It’s sad that in 2021 rather than living in a more connected world we just have a bunch of fragmented walled gardens of messaging apps that don’t talk to each other. I would love for something like matrix to take off or even work but the big players will never open up their API’s enough to let it work fully. Long live email and PSTN, at least they’re interoperable.
standard MS business model
Spend billions take over a competitor, destroy its core functionality to fit better into the windows business model, reduce funding until a competitor comes in and replaces it, spend billions creating your own version that does the same thing.
To be honest, I don't know why everytime they buy these things they just instead pile a few billion greenbacks in a big bonfire and publically set light to it. I think they would be more cost efficient
When their employees are into discord. Linking up accounts is a no brainer for them.
No privacy from the Big-tech equivalent of Saurons eye seems to be our unavoidable destiny in this great capitalist world of mice where every good idea gets squashed and exploited by a gang of four elephants.
On the plus side, we of course will then also receive better personalized ads for the latest games.
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