I don't see how giving money to Tencent has anything to do with the ability to steer SO.
The best thing would have been the status quo. SO has been running on its feet for many years. This consolidation, while disputably better than Microsoft acquisition, is no worse than large companies buying out small ones usually guaranteing their demise.
If anything else, Microsoft has left Github untouched so far.
I am not convinced that this is "absolutely phenomenal".
Naspers might have made smart bets in past but I am not sure how this means they will run the community well.
I would have been more happy with a Microsoft acquisition (although that ends up making them even more powerful) as it ties into Microsoft's existing products well, so they don't need to necessarily change SO too much to make money from it.
It can tie to their dev tooling story with GitHub, VSCode etc on one end and from LinkedIn end, they could have tied SO's jobs platform to Linkedin one. This makes MS more powerful but it might have left SO largely untouched.
Looking outside of the gaming space their recent acquisitions seem to have gone fine, no? For example Github seems to go well, Linkedin was always pretty shit and unethical, so I'm not sure it's any better or worse. Citus seems to still be going well and still offers on-prem or enterprise versions on other clouds than Azure. Xamarin is more open-sourced since Microsoft took over.
IMO, (and if you told me I'd say this 10 years ago I'd say you're crazy) of the big tech companies right now I think MS might be the best steward.
Thanks for the clarification, that makes more sense.
Personally, I would think microsoft would be easier to "motivate" to share given they probably have more investments in china which could be used as leverage.
Realistically, out of all of the BigCorps who could have bought it (and who have deep enough pockets to sustain its bleeding,) Microsoft is one of the best of a bad bunch.
I'm not quite as cynical as the author of the OP when it comes to Microsoft's recent apparent change of direction, but who knows, that may just be naivety speaking.
We should bail out of some lang as soon they loose first dollar? And MS is not loosing any dollars yet.
Dev ecosystem and market are quite healthy, even I'd like to see more small (web, startups) projects out there.
Probably good for Microsoft- the acquisition was agreed at bubble prices, and driven by copying a business that hasn't worked out.
SEA Ltd had great promise in 2021 - they made a hyper popular game and used those revenues and user mindshare to branch out into ecomerce, financial services and all sorts. It was seem as an important part to cradle snatch Gen A before they signed up to meta and amazon.
With metaverse ideas also peaking it seemed like a must do strategy for every conglomerate to get into games. Amazon did too!
In 2022, SEA and Meta are not healthy. Thier plan to invest heavily and get paid later does not make sense in a higher rate environment where the payoff is less than you'd make saving your money in bonds.
Microsoft has a long term interest in games, but it doesn't need to supercharge it. There are better uses for the 70 billion.
There are people leading those companies, but they're so few and far between that you can probably list them off the top of your head in the tech space. When a successful company like GitHub can't pass up double-digit billions, then, really, what hope is there? Companies like Microsoft have $130B of cash on hand, and (almost) everyone has a price. They can go buy several more of those companies, and that's why we hear a new $20B buyout rumor every week. If you could, you would too. IMO, that's why we need to start capping company size/valuation. There's no social good in Microsoft owning all the things they do. It only benefits the executives at MS and large shareholders, and I think they're benefitting enough already.
Well, YHOO's total market cap is now about $37.36B, so it's not a complete travesty. (MSFT would have gotten the Alibaba investment with the $45B offer)
Fair enough; I understand that point of view, and even had it myself, to some degree. But I also think that has little to do with MSFT. The same would be said if SF, or Amazon, or (insert any other large corp) would have bought them.
I also think GitHub, essentially, positioned themselves that way. However, that, if viewed a bit cynically, could easily be seen as just marketing or PR.
It feels like this article is a lot of FUD spreading. MS is a business that likes to make money. At this point, there are developer minded people at the helm, and it makes more sense selling their software and cloud services than chasing negative returns on Windows. I can see that side of it through and through.
MS has open sourced huge amounts of resource and platform building code in .Net Core the past several years, and ASP.Net earlier than that. They did buy, and have expanded on the tools from Xamarin not shutter it. I'm not saying they're altruistic in nature, no company is. I will say that their behavior in the community, especially since Nadella took over has been better than any other company of it's size or larger that I can think of.
I'm not saying forget or forgive the past, but accept the present. Corporations, despite legalities, are not people. They are made up of people, and a significant portion of management has rolled over in the past decade and the outward facing culture shows that.
Microsoft should just invest 10% of its revenue in a YC-like fund that produces independently operated but partly MS-owned companies that join their ecosystem. The brain drain over there is ridiculous - how are they ever going to produce anything competitive now?
Also, VS Code went from zero to > 50% market share, and Azure, Teams, etc are growing fast. GitHub is adding MS ecosystem integrations at a rapid pace.
I don’t think that adds up to a very bearish story.
i think u r right in the sense that i would rather acquire 10 different futuristic companies than just one jumbo that can fail terribly ... it would have been better if ms bought something like social networking, voip, cloud apps, virtual s/w for desktop etc. companies than just one single content provider.
The best thing would have been the status quo. SO has been running on its feet for many years. This consolidation, while disputably better than Microsoft acquisition, is no worse than large companies buying out small ones usually guaranteing their demise.
If anything else, Microsoft has left Github untouched so far.
I am not convinced that this is "absolutely phenomenal".
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