throwaway78359

I have absolutely zero faith in our ability to execute on the consumer side with this type of product. We couldn’t even make an also-ran Twitch competitor, despite literally owning one of the major consoles and being the platform for 99.99% of all PC games.

Minecraft was a good acquisition. Xbox, by and large, has made good acquisitions. But the rumor isn’t Xbox is buying TikTok, it’s Microsoft.

I would argue that with the exception of Xbox, Microsoft doesn’t have a strong consumer play and I would further argue it doesn’t need it. The re-emphasis on developer tools (GitHub, WSL2, Windows Terminal, Visual Studio Code) and productivity (Office 365 and M365, Power Platform) has been a boon for the business. Pure consumer pursuits like Cortana or Windows Phone or Groove Music have not worked.

We’re not a company that has social in our DNA. GitHub and LinkedIn are acquisitions that are run with various degrees of autonomy, but even as independent entities, neither was ever social the way Twitter or Facebook are.

When you talk about brand value for Gen Z, I understand what you’re saying, but I fully disagree chasing that potential value has legs. How many times has Microsoft tried to be “cool” over the last 45 years and how many times has it failed at it? Microsoft is at its most successful when it stops trying to chase trends and be cool and just focuses on the stuff it is good at.

LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator when paired with Dynamics 365 is a very viable competitor to Salesforce in the ERP/CRM space.

Throwaway for obvious reasons. I cannot understand what executive thinks this is a good idea or that it makes any sense in the broader organizational structure of Microsoft.

It's been so nice to see five years or so of relatively GOOD acquisitions. LinkedIn made sense: it's allowed for a legitimate Salesforce compete, especially when paired with Dynamics. GitHub was incredibly smart and it aligns well with the resurgent dev tools division and the cloud. Even Beam (Mixer), which was an utter failure from an execution standpoint, made sense as a vertical integration play with Xbox. It failed, but the idea behind it was solid. The OpenAI investment and other AI initiatives have all made tons of sense. Buying Xamarin was brilliant.

But this? What about Microsoft has any of the same DNA as TikTok?

Insanity. I really, really hope this is just a bad joke and us being used by TikTok to juice offers from other people.

Exactly.

Microsoftie here — throwaway for obvious reasons.

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.