That's what we said about the Skype acquisition too.
"It's different this time, it will run independently, for once Microsoft won't interfere and destroy the acquired company".
3 years later (I was there), 50% of Skype original management and developers left. All the major new projects of Skype turn out to be integration with the endless already existing Microsoft products: integration with Link, integration with microsoft ID, integration with Microsoft UI, etc...
5 years later, Skype is dead... but everyone left already.
Good job Microsoft.
Seriously, go use products like Google Hangouts, Slack or Microsoft Teams (Microsofts's surprisingly better clone of Slack) and then tell me that Skype was ruined by integrating with Microsoft's other product base. The closest argument you might be able to make is that Skype could have developed new features or updated its UI and stayed competitive, but that wouldn't give them the competitive edge that it's competitors nearly all had in terms of being backed by major tech companies. Additionally, the major revenue source was Business tier use, which Microsoft dramatically improved by integrating it with their other cloud-based business suite applications.
Microsoft didn't kill Skype, if anything they extended its life expectancy and value in markets that actually paid to use it. It's dead/dying now because better tools have been developed and marketed to replace it. That's just standard product life cycle.
Personal experience, but I have not found a single person who likes MS Teams. Usually people around me say that Slack is ok-ish, while MS Teams is crap.
I've the misfortune of being forced to use Skype and I would kill to have it replaced with Teams at my workplace.
There is a half-baked link between Skype and Lync to make it seem like it's the same product. This link is all shitty mainly because Lync and Skype work completely differently, and even simple things like call signaling have to deal with years of legacy Microsoft SIP extensions that were punched into Lync.
I remember the first time we received access to the Lync code repository. That stuff was a multi-GB (!!!) repository that contained files, promo videos, PDFs, code, etc. That tells you much about the development practices behind Lync.
It's not great, but in the corporate space, Teams does an OK job, and MS is a reputable company for B2B.
Corporate standard at my place of work. I hate Hangouts with a passion. It's the worst messenger, feature- and UI- wise that I've seen for years.
> Microsoft Teams (Microsofts's surprisingly better clone of Slack)
No it isn't. Used Teams at another company which adopted it as the standard. Couple of years ago. Feature-wise it was like a proof of concept, very early access.
> Additionally, the major revenue source was Business tier use, which Microsoft dramatically improved by integrating it with their other cloud-based business suite applications.
Again, I worked at another company where Skype for Business was the standard and nobody ever used it unless they needed formal IT help or something.
All the teams I'm acquainted with at my current place refuse to communicate on Hangouts and, in violation of corporate policies use something else like Slack or Mattermost.
You have to understand that the technology underlying Skype at the time was very brittle and poorly designed.
Google almost bought Skype before Microsoft did and backed out after they got a look at the code.
When Microsoft acquired it Skype was routing its traffic over port 80 for example.
__I have to understand__ ?
Who is saying this? do you have any credentials / knowledge of Skype technology? My understanding is that you only report indirect discussion from "your friends who worked on it"?
Having been there, I would say quite the opposite.
Skype had pretty intricate means to bypass NAT to NAT clients. I would even go as far as saying that Skype P2P connectivity tricks were top notch, considering the incredible amount of different network setups that clients could face. Even in the weirdest conditions, you could trust your Skype client to somehow find a way to get the call through. This was through an immense collection of in-house-trial-and-error-STUN-hole-punching like techniques.
Now I can understand that for people outside of the peer to peer connectivity world, these techniques could seem completely foreign and brittle, but it's not. It's the world of internet clients we live in. It's not related to Skype, it's the route all peer to peer clients have to deal with. If you don't want that, don't go peer to peer.
> Google almost bought Skype before Microsoft did and backed out after they got a look at the code.
Where did you get that information? I had never heard of that interpretation of the story before.
My view on this is that Google considered buying Skype, but backed up because they wanted to have a cloud based service, instead of a p2p one. Microsoft was in the same state of mind, but decided to go along and migrate Skype to be a cloud service, which they did.
Now if you really want to discuss technical details and the state of Microsoft/Azure at that time, I would be pleased to do so.
Microsoft started the migration of Skype to the cloud at a time Azure was just a big beta test. Nothing was working properly, the tools were sub-par or in-existent. Nothing was reliable. You would deploy Azure services through remote desktop automated by PowerShell scripts. Managing databases was done through in-browser silverlight clients - yes, that was already EOL at the time, but that was the only way to perform DB queries with a UI.
When complaining about the deplorable half-baked status of the tooling and cloud services that we were required to use to migrate Skype, the only response was "Yeahhh, Eat your own dog food".
Thanks but no thanks.
All the great Skype engineers left in the two years after the start of the migration to Azure - mostly to join Twilio.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2011/05/why-googl...
Key points:
He did not think Skypes p2p communication was a good fit for Google, going so far as to say it ate up bandwidth and was like an old technology.
The PM's remarks could be summarized as saying the basic p2p communication architecture was overly and only used in order to avoid a cloud/server based architecture.
Basically, the PM thought Skypes architecture and code base couldn't effectively scale or meet real world business requirements that people would pay for.
Like VCs who try to invest in a company but lose the deal (or never get to see it at all): "Oh FooBbarApp? Yeah, we passed"
Put another way, if both sides block 80 incoming, their only hope is fancy NAT-punching techniques.
But those NAT-punching tricks are useless if they are using a port that is completely blocked on the outbound side.
“On 10 May 2011, Microsoft Corporation acquired Skype Communications, S. à r.l for US$8.5 billion”
I think Microsoft has changed significantly in the last decade.
I’m quietly hopeful the npm acquisition will go well for us (although I still hold some serious grudges about Microsoft’s past behaviour).
Thats not the important thing, thats the problem. Npm could easily be an open source client. Contain less code and be better. And have a mirors system like every other repo so it does not need money for hosting.
Npm wanted to control nodejs and make money out it. And they have.
Microsoft purchased that control and plan to make money out of it.
This is bad news for OS dev.
The NPM client is and has always been open source: https://github.com/npm/cli.
> Npm wanted to control nodejs and make money out it. And they have.
In what way, other than offering private package hosting for enterprises?
What does this even mean?
No interest in mirrors from day one.
Npm sold out to Microsoft and got paid. All that free community effort to stop Npms "crashiness" got sold to Microsoft for dollar.
Nodejs went to the Linux foundation.
Npm went to Microsoft.
Suprised?
You said they controlled nodejs, and that they somehow earned money by controlling nodejs. I think that neither of those has ever been the case.
What happened with yarn? As a very casual user of it, it seems to work well and have pushed npm to innovate a bit when it was stagnating. But I haven’t followed it lately. Were there technical issues or political drama?
I mean, zip files are hardly complex. PnP is a breath of fresh air and lets you commit packages "safely" to your SCM without LFS. NPM has been experimenting in v7 with similar ideas.
I'm personally quite fond of "zero-install" setup to a repo.
.NET Core was a great move and it's all coming together nicely now, and even creating innovations like Blazor.
> Microsoft can’t even put coherent dev strategy outside of .NET on Azure
They said that .NET and Azure, two separate things, are very well managed. OP did not imply any correlation between the two of them.
I missed something, what happened to Yarn?
This seems to be pretty fair about the whole thing: https://shift.infinite.red/yarn-1-vs-yarn-2-vs-npm-a69ccf022...
https://yarnpkg.com/advanced/qa#is-yarn-operated-by-facebook
IMO its crazy we're here, growing up in the IE days, but Microsoft acquiring influence over the JS ecosystem in this day and age is at least arguably, as OP stated, a distribution of power.
Support is middling, but once you get it working, you have near-instance near-zero size installs.
[0] https://github.com/atom-archive/xray
[1] They never officially announced it, but they almost certainly de-staffed it to the point where it's barely on life support: https://imgur.com/a/jQBHsUk
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman...
Update:
What a surprise, the VSCode fanboys are coming in droves to downvote and say nothing more than how Atom was going to die anyways.
Sure, maybe it was, but that's not the point. The point is Microsoft _actively pulled development resources away from Atom after explicitly claiming they wouldn't_.
I get that a lot of people like VSCode better than Atom, but _please_ put things into perspective for a moment and consider if you'd make the same comment if the same thing happened to _your pet project that happened to be #2 in popularity but then got axed after being acquired by the company who owned the #1 after claiming they wouldn't do exactly that_.
Whatever your opinion might be on Atom vs VSCode, can we not at least agree that this kind of behavior is something we should hold acquiring companies accountable for? It might not make any difference to their bottom line at the end of the day, but the least we should do is hold them to the fire in the court of public opinion.
If commit activity graphs are really a meaningful measure, look at VSCode's:
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/graphs/commit-activity
The number of commits per, uh, date unit (the graph is not super clear on that axis, honestly) across the entire length of VSCode's activity graph rarely drops as low as the highest number of commits per date unit for Atom.
I'd have preferred to see both survive and do well, but that really hasn't been the way the text editor space seems to have worked. Editors that are conceptually awfully similar to one another tend to have one dominant player: TextMate (at least for Macs), then Sublime Text, then Atom, then very quickly Code. Given that Code and Atom are probably the closest of any two in that list, this just isn't that surprising.
Atom still had a healthy number of active contributors (presumably most of them were from GitHub) making improvements to the product on a daily basis to make it a perfectly viable tool for the people who chose to use it (and despite the much smaller developer base they continued to innovate with projects like xray and tree-sitter)... That is until the Microsoft acquisition happened.
Before anyone jumps in with the causation vs correlation argument, I think any reasonable person looking at the evidence would agree that the timing is convenient enough to make it highly unlikely to have been a coincidence, especially considering that most of those contributions were from employees at GitHub who were _getting paid to work on Atom_, so the only reasonable explanation for the contributions to stop abruptly within a month is that they _stopped getting paid to work on Atom_.
To add insult to injury they even had the audacity to claim they wouldn't do exactly what they did. That is the crux of my issue with how they handled this acquisition.
But the words of the linked Reddit comment from Nat Friedman were "we will continue to develop and support both Atom and VS Code going forward"; that's a true statement today. Atom is currently being developed and supported. That's a case of adhering to the letter of the statement rather than the spirit, I know. But that circles around to the problem of VSCode's rapid ascent in mindshare -- if your company ends up owning two very similar editors and they both have roughly equal downloads and community interest, you might try to support both equally. But if one of them has orders of magnitude more downloads and community interest than the other, you're going to focus your efforts on the popular one.
It's quite possible that this was just a random side-effect from a shift in focus, instead of a planned sabotage.
I was an user of Atom and later switched to VSCode. It took me few months of weighting all the options before I made the switch. That's how much I love Microsoft -- Very little.
Don't know if they got it fixed, but there was a design flaw in Atom: Bug inside some Atom plugin (`linter-ui-default` is one of it if my memory is correct) can reset the entire Atom into it's default setting, and it happens randomly (See link 1, 2 and 3).
This problem pisses me off so much and so many times. The last time it happened, I accidentally deleted my backup configuration `config.cson` when trying to recover the setting. Yes, it is technically my fault, but no, really, it is not. So, after seeing all my life flashed before my eyes, I decided to stop living ... with Atom, I had enough.
VSCode is generally a better editor when compare to Atom. I mean, VSCode has it own issues, sure. But for me, so far those issues are mild and usually got fixed quickly.
1: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/14922 2: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/14909 3: https://discuss.atom.io/t/atom-keeps-losing-settings/61617 (This one was in 2018 while the other two was in 2017)
It's possible that one of the linter providers had that issue, and since Linter providers are only called by the linter package, they wouldn't exhibit the issue on their own. It's not uncommon to have issues that seem like it's the linter's fault since all of the providers do nothing and seem harmless unless invoked by the linter package.
I would've helped to debug this, had somebody pinged me on any of the issues. Oh well :)
So maybe it's not a bug of `linter-ui-default` after all. Sorry dear innocent man, my judgement is not always on point :)
Lack of delivery killed Atom, not Microsoft.
I don't think so. When VS Code came out my reaction was "Wow! It's like a 1.0 version of Atom!" I.e. an electron (or similar) based editor that works, whereas atom always seemed like a beta release. I tried to use atom a bit but it came with little out of the box and the plugin ecosystem was a complete mess. I filed an issue asking if obsolete/dead plugins could be somehow removed from the plugin repository, but nothing came of it.
Atom wasn't killed, it died on its own.
What need does Atom fill that VSCode doesn't?
what is EEE?
> "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate",is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
The initial capabilities look similar and circle really needs a competitor with how flaky their service has recently been.
For someone who's not a pro in using CIs, it's been much easier to use than CircleCI. I never have to spend more than 20 or 30 minutes fiddling with Actions to make it actually work.
This for me is the biggest contribution to open source: normal people like me (who don't want to get too familiar with proprietary or overengineered CI tech) will be able to have CIs for pretty much ALL their projects.
If they did choose to EEE, this makes it more likely, not less.
Free in "freedom of speech" is the ability to say anything you want.
Your choice of free means cost.
So you're free to speak, but the speech itself isn't free.
Freedom of speech is by definition exactly this: free of consequences.
Right. It’s freedom of consequences from a specific entity, the government, not freedom from consequences in general.
Re 2: No. It's just the usual implementation.
So by your definition freedom of speech cannot exist, or you need to refine your meaning of "concequences". That refined meaning is accepted as conceqences from the government.
Any other meaning is senseless because people are free agents and may respond to your speech in any way they feel fit.
Your employer or society in general absolutely can via the consequences of what you say. If you are making your employer look bad then they can and should be able to get rid of you.
If society decides they don't like you because of what you say and choose not to associate with you or use your business than that also feels fair enough.
Microsoft doesn’t do everything right but the GitHub acquisition has honestly gone better than I ever expected. Rather than forcing GitHub to adopt Microsoft centric policies, Microsoft has adopted more GitHub stuff, especially from a product POV. GitHub still runs as a separate company (different logins and health care and hiring systems) with its own policies and point of view.
The reality is npm was in a bad place and in a land of not good options, this strikes me as the best possibility. I’d rather have GitHub control this and be able to give the resources to npm than a company like Oracle or Amazon or even Google or Facebook to own it. In a perfect world, some independent entity could fund npm out of gratitude but at the same time, consider how poorly npm as a company was run for YEARS and the general lack of direction.
So yeah, I’m cautiously optimistic this won’t be fucked up by GitHub — but I understand the concern.
As for those worried about Microsoft embracing, extending, and extinguishing. Lol. Even if that was the goal (and I truly don’t think that’s the ethos at all any more), Microsoft is laughably incompetent at achieving that sort of strategy. Google and Amazon have the EEE under lock right now (Facebook too — let’s be glad Zuck didn’t buy this after we saw what happened to yarn), but Microsoft can’t even put coherent dev strategy outside of .NET on Azure.