Is seems to me the top five software companies are on a never-ending quest to buy up every other promising software company. GitHub, Twitch, Mojang, Instagram, WhatsApp... I'd love to see a few smaller software companies refuse to get bought up and instead cultivate an independent mindset. Otherwise, we end up with a world completely dominated by Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook.

It's unlikely. I suspect many people start businesses with the intention of doing what they love and making a decent living out of it.

Then the bigger the company gets, the further removed you are from your original dream and when someone waves a big pile of money in your face, it's a very tempting offer

This is often a very good reason why many sucessfull startups sell.

Also many of the founders have an "entrepreneurial spirit", which really means to me they prefer to start things, make it a success (or not) and then move on, over and over again. They are not often a "lifer" that hang on at the same company till they retire. Some are, many not.

Or similar to why engineers get stuck in managerial roles.

The money stops at a certain level, then they become a manager to reach the next pay grade. Then don't enjoy their job because they're not doing the engineering, but can't go back to the lower salary once they've adjusted to the lifestyle

Another factor is that you may believe the larger company can take the idea you are passionate about further.

In practice they /usually/ take it right where you left it, and leave it there forever

or worse, at as common: make it worse in every way

>I'd love to see a few smaller software companies refuse to get bought up and instead cultivate an independent mindset.

Didn't Oakley sunglasses try something similar when Luxottica first tried to buy them and then Luxottica managed to ruin them and ended up buying them much cheaper?

And hasn't Microsoft already done the same to a large number of startups?

> And hasn't Microsoft already done the same to a large number of startups?

Not just startups. They tried to acquire Nokia's handset business and initially failed. Stephen Elop (ex-MS) was installed as new CEO via investor pressure, Nokia abandoned their promising Linux-based phones and changed direction to Windows Mobile and then it was acquired after all. And failed.

Elop has, of course, denied having been a trojan horse for Microsoft at Nokia after the initial failed acquisiton attempt. Nokia's share price and profit lowered considerably during his tenure as a CEO, making it much cheaper to acquire.

Resisting acquisition can be very challenging, and takes a lot of energy and time.

Yes, it pretty much went that way, but Elop seems dead set on killing off nokia so Microsoft could buy it for pennies on the dollar. First it was the "we are on a burning platform letter", then abandoned all their current customers, moved everything to windows mobile, then months later switched to a new version of the microsoft mobile with no upgrade path for the users who just bought new windows mobile phones.

The market at that point pretty much decided to skip that mess and go with IOS or Android.

> Resisting acquisition can be very challenging, and takes a lot of energy and time.

Not at all. You just have to be a company that is a) private, b) not funded by VC, and c) profitable enough. Then all you have to do is just politely reject all incoming requests (e.g., "sorry, we are not interested [at this time]"). :-)

> Nokia abandoned their promising Linux-based phones

"Promising" is an interesting choice of words here.

The Nokia N9 was very well-received. If you need lots of glowing citations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9#Reception

If anything, "promising" may be the wrong choice of words because it was arguably better and more mature than the equivalent debut iOS and webOS devices at launch. Of course that's cheating a bit, as the tech stack had some history behind it by that point. Still, for a line-incepting product it was very impressive execution, especially for a company that was still so hung up on a legacy product line at the same time (Symbian).

Personally, I used one as well and I don't find it very hard to imagine a version of the world where it could still be my preferred OS/ecosystem right now. It was truly a strange situation, and Nokia of the day one strange animal of a dissonant company. I don't know if Nokia would have made it without the MS interference -- but I think it didn't help.

This is a nice little nostalgia anecdote too that gets discussed on HN occasionally: http://nition.momentstudio.co.nz/2014/08/the-nokia-n9-alarm-...

Example #1: Teams is currently eating Slack.

I still recall their 2016 full page add in the New York Times

"We realized a few years ago that the value of switching to Slack was so obvious and the advantages so overwhelming that every business would be using Slack, or “something just like it,” within the decade."[0]

They were right about the "something just like it" part.[1]

[0] https://slack.com/blog/news/dear-microsoft#.r90mkakwl

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/26/21195092/slack-new-user-r...

Yep. It's not enough to have a better product when Teams comes "free" for a lot of orgs.

I don’t know at which point slack is better. We use both and I find teams annoying and weird but I prefer it because it is less distracting than slack. In some ways slack feels designed to keep my attention and stay engaged.

I haven't used Teams in almost two years, but when I did I never felt like I was sure "where" I was, or where anything else was. I'd find myself "somewhere" not have no confidence I'd ever be able to get back. I hated using it. Anything I cared about I'd copy out, or keep notes, including stuff that I'd absolutely leave to Slack to keep for me (so, middling-important stuff).

Lots of enterprise UI is like that for me, actually, including most PM software more complex than GH issues + boards. I find them extremely uncomfortable to use because I'm never confident I'm doing the right thing, or that what I'm doing is safe to do, or whether I'll be able to find the things I need again.

Slack is heading that way with some of their changes (the way drafts and threads are handled is juuuuust on the edge of putting it in that territory) but I still never feel "lost" for long, on there.

Unfortunately the smaller companies don't have a choice. Many acquisitions from Big Tech come with a threat - sell your company or we will move into your space and tank your valuation.

Sometimes they simply don't have a viable path to staying independent and profitable. Discord has tried a few things to earn more money (premium subscriptions, a game store) that didn't work out. I don't think they have a lot of options other than selling.

Did they not work out? I see people boosting servers and people with paid accounts very often. It seems they had a market willing to pay.

They make revenue, but I don't think they profit. I honestly doubt my $5 subscription offsets my costs as a user + my share of the unpaying users. Not that I pay that close of attention to their financials.

I think compared to Microsoft's offer, no.

discord is too big to be killed this easily. any msft copycat will be like facebook trying to kill snapchat

There are at least a couple out there. Snapchat turned down a $3B offer from Facebook to stay independent, and I believe Twitter have turned down similar offers through the years.

Dropbox as well, they're not doing too bad either with a market cap of $11bn. That's quite impressive considering pretty much everybody has developed a competing service, and they must have known that would be inevitable.

Mostly Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. Amazon is far more likely to partner with a company than clone it’s products. Apple acquires mostly smaller companies, often things you’ve never heard of.

Also worth noting, many of these smaller companies plan on getting acquired. That is their cash-out. In particular the ones which accept VC money are under tremendous pressure to cash out in one of these deals.

I also would prefer companies stuck it out, but there are huge risks if you stick it out and massive payoffs you get from a buyout, it’s rarely in the founder’s best interest.

> Amazon is far more likely to partner with a company than clone it’s products

Like their notable partnership with Netflix!

Oh wait no, I meant their obviously built to compete with Netflix Amazon Prime Video service.

I meant partner with them then clone it’s products. Or just clone their products. That’s a total difference in meaning.

What's in it for the smaller software companies in "refusing" to get bought up?

Obviously, they have the opportunity to get even bigger and either IPO or get purchased for a higher price... but they also have a risk of losing market share (and value) to competitors... or being acquired by a larger company might give them the funding, marketing power, business alignment, etc. to accelerate their growth.

(Not talking specifically about Discord - I know almost nothing about their service.)

Yeah.... but also a good way to get paid for a lot of people who then go on to start up new and interesting things that may or may not get dominated by the big 6.

That's impossible.Tech is currently unregulated anarchy. Big Tech is allowed to do whatever it wants despite obviously using predatory pricing.

I wonder whether Microsoft would try and tie Discord accounts to Microsoft accounts. I think it'd be a bad call, as unlike Mojang (to be fair, it took years for Microsoft to actually migrate them), Discord does have a proper accounts infrastructure built up, one which is used as an authentication service of its own. Easier integration and auto signup with MSFT accounts, sure, but I think it would be a mistake to do a migration.

LinkedIn and Github are good examples to show that they wouldn't.

That would be a nightmare. It currently takes anywhere between 2 and 5 redirects to log into one of my MSFT accounts.

Personally I find microsoft Authenticator pretty nice. Yes, there’s more requests but it’s easier to tap a button on my watch than to drag open some other Authenticator and type in a pin.

Don't forget the password reset.

Back few years ago after MS purchased Skype they did add support for MSN/Live accounts in that messenger and ultimately, at some point user was forced to log into Skype with MSN account and merge contact lists.

But it seems even today it's still possible to use Skype with old native accounts, along with Microsoft account and what I just discover... with Github accounts. So if they do purchase Discord it might be possible that in future this IM will get support for MS accounts (I wouldn't be surprised if also Github ones) and users will be also offered merge and login with MS account alone containing "old" Discord accounts data for MS definition of "convenience". After all Microsoft account it's their single sign-on feature.

If purchase will take place, I think the question is what they'll do with it: keeping Discord as exclusively game-oriented IM that will somehow be merged with their Xbox infrastructure or abandon Microsoft Teams/merge it with Discord and keep it as business/professional oriented communication platform. Discord might be left alone for a while but I think MS will eventually give it a special place somewhere under their umbrella of services.

> Discord as exclusively game-oriented IM

I mean, Discord is currently in the process of abandoning the game-oriented model, and being a general IM app [1].

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/30/21308194/discord-gaming-u...

Sure but if purchased Microsoft can have own plans regarding Discord

Sometimes I wonder if the world would be better or worse if there was a max size for companies.

It’s also interesting how many chat apps are acquired and exist. Just how large is that market?

I don't think it's necessarily that bad when there's a single large company that dominates a space. from a user's perspective, google search is probably better than any alternative involving four or five competitors on equal footing. some things scale really well.

more of a problem is when one company is a big player in several horizontal markets, creating an opportunity to take over new markets with a mediocre offering.

These companies are as much funds as they are companies, should there be a limit on capital pooling?

TBH, I think it might be good to put limits on company types i.e. what type of business a company can do at a certain scale; and very different rules for large vs small companies in general (and maybe private/low-majority-shareholder-count versus public corps) - that way a tech company can just go into another industry and dominate on the basis of better funding alone.

I'd also really like to see product based shares/corp-ownership; where ip, copyright etc for a product are held only by a co-op that issues shares/agreements with associated partners companies. That way instead of having a corp first, with its product to support it; you could have a product first, with a company to support it.

From what I've seen the big companies just stink at chat period, so they go in buy a chat company, ruin the product and someone else moves into the space and starts taking market share again.

Examples include

AIM

Skype

Slack

and now Discord

Or the chat product space is just constantly evolving, so older platforms inevitably get left behind after radically new ones pop up.

I don't think that companies are bad at making chat. I think that chat is difficult to make profitable to maintain.

It would be interesting to have limits on size. Something like a max of 1 million users.

Optimistically, it would result in all applications being federated and there being a multitude of hosting platforms to choose from.

Or Microsoft would sell Teams server software to hosting companies with strict requirements like not allowing connections to competing products. Or just slightly alter the existing O365 reseller model..."We don't have 100 million users, we have 100 users (resellers) who each have sold 1 million licenses."

> Sometimes I wonder if the world would be better or worse if there was a max size for companies.

when there's a will there's a way. the companies that want to grow that badly will find a way to evade such restictions like they do to taxes, they'll probably call it something like organisational structure optimization.

I don't get it. What's the benefit of buying a community? It's not like you can really control what the community does or thinks, you may can control which ads they see but how else do you make money with this community?

> so Microsoft migrating Discord over to Azure would be seen as a big win for its cloud ambitions.

What should this prove? That Azure can run a big service like Discord? I don't think Microsoft has to prove that. Hosting Discord on Azure will be a massive cost factor, how should this pay off?

I don't know how things look from microsoft's point of view, but I see lots of "nice to have" aspects of being in charge of one of the popular social platforms.

Lots of people cut their programmatic teeth building simple things that interact with these platforms. It would be nice for Microsoft if every teenager building a bot to play fart noises on discord does so on Azure™ building with Microsoft Visual Studio Code™. The fact that AWS has been the standard "go to" place for people to get cloud servers up and running has been nice for them.

Also, it creates opportunities for these "cool" companies to write technical blog posts for your stuff. I think Discord has helped Elixir rise in popularity - I'm sure Microsoft would like to see something like their "how Discord scaled to 5m concurrent users" for C# (or whatever stack they want to promote).

Now, I have no idea how big a deal this would be. I really doubt it's a $10b big deal. I agree that "the community" isn't a reliable factor. If anything, I think this purchase puts the community at risk. People like that Discord is a small company that needs to care about how good its servers are. If they suddenly are owned by a giant company that might care less, people might look around for alternatives.

I might guess also better integration with their games products, identity integration, expanding on the growing in game/streaming ads market e.g. Unity.

App install ads on consoles or future mobile platforms.

Plus just more lucrative ads on Discord expanding (or including if they don't have) in stream video. MSFT already has a crappy ad network but they have a lot of addressable potential.

Maybe they have a larger streaming vision and this is a way to build streaming content, or console CTV media channels paying and assisting premium creators like YouTube. A lot of these streams end up on youtube already.

It's ok if you don't know how to monetize the network effect. Microsoft does.

All the talk is about community, mainly related to gaming. I think there is more to Discord: it's a great platform for programming projects. There are quite a few there already and with a few more developer friendly features it may just snowball. It's a great addition to GitHub for discussing functionality, posting tests, ideas, protect related news or even loose chat.

You can combine developers, users, fans having access to the same community (with some channels being exclusive for a given group and other being public). There might be a technical discussion about implementing a given feature or optimizing part of the code in one channel and related YouTube videos in a media related channel. Two examples are Leela Zero and Leela Chess Zero projects. Check them out, it's something you will never get on a platform like GitHub.

There is nothing like that anywhere else. It's very unique experience you will never get on GitHub, Slack or anywhere else.

Yes, this is absolutely true.

In addition to the above, two virtual conferences I’ve attended in the last year have used Discord as their interface for attendees and speakers & organisers. It’s versatile, has a decent permissions structure & supports audio/video sharing. (Although both conferences chose to use Zoom for the actual talks.)

This is the same company that cannot be bothered to fix adding iCalendar files to a calendar for Outlook for Mac.

I’m really tired of Microsoft’s influence in the software industry. Hopefully their lack of care for customers will finally bite them. I’m skeptical though, it seems Silicon Valley giants can just keep buying up smaller companies to acquire customers.

> "Creation, creation, creation" said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

Microsoft knows its mantras well.

context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaVTHG-Ev4k

In this case, they bought it, bought it, bought it.

I’ve always been curious about this. If they sell it, could they just cash out everything and walk away and start a new project? It can’t be as simple as that right?

Typically acquisitions come with a lot of legal "handcuffs" around what the acquired company is allowed to say in public, how long they'll need to work at the new company, etc.

Great article, but how on Earth would migrating Discord away from GCP be relevant to Microsoft's ambitions?

Did Apple pat itself on the back when it bought corporate iPhones for the Beats employees?

They shouldn't be allowed to have it

Discord is capable of organic growth. Teams isn't.

They are not very related categories.

People use slack because they liked it and convinced their managers.

MSFT has direct access to every single CTO/CIO in the world. They have a sales pipe into most of them along with a bunch of other products. 'Teams' is on paper, the Slack equivalent that rolls in along with the other products and will likely be preferred by Managers.

I believe that Discord has 1) more resonance with XBox than Teams, and 2) it gives MSFT access to a true, consumer, content oriented setting. Like FB, TikTok etc. which is a cultural access point they don't have.

MS already has GitHub and Yammer, too.

Where is yammer popular? I worked at a place that signed our corporate accounts to that service. It looked like a knock off corporate Facebook at the time. I had figured it withered and died but I’ve heard of it again multiple times recently. Though I still know of no one that actually uses it or has heard of it.

It's alive within consultancies that are chained to MrSoftie.

They seem to be integrating it with Teams.

Embrace Extend Extinguish.

This isn't really what this is. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" is the idea that Microsoft would embrace open standards just enough to add their own proprietary extensions, then once theirs is the dominant platform, drop the remaining open support and kill the competitor.

This is just...buying a company.