Report: Microsoft in talks for $10 billion acquisition of Discord
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You are right.
I use both Teams for work and Discord personal. In its current form I would not use discord for anything professional clients would question it as the interface does not look like something a professional would use. They would have to change that if the goal is more integration for that crowd.
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LinkedIn was always a nightmare, so there wasn't much they could do to make it worse.
They came very close to messing up Github. I think the jury is still out on that one - there are so many ways they could abuse their control.
I'll give you Minecraft, though - they've kept a surprisingly light touch on that ecosystem. But then, it never did turn out to be important, or even relevant to Microsoft's grander schemes (such as they are).
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This is inaccurate. Like any big corporation, Microsoft's goal for acquisitions is not "to make money." It's to boost its share value - which is how the executives who make these decisions get the biggest part of their compensation.
Over the past decade or more, Microsoft has often done things that make no sense, simply because they look vaguely 'strategic.' But the truth is, the company has not had any real strategy since Gates left - just a mountain of cash, and lots of stupid ways of spending it in order to impress investors.
The Discord acquisition looks 'strategic,' and that's enough.
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Curse had some Discord-like functionality in their app when they were bought by Amazon/Twitch. I don't recall if it made it into the replacement Twitch app but I don't remember seeing this functionality when I was using it last year.
Edit: It took me a little while to find, but support for these features ended in 2019.
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I remember when everyone was on Teamspeak.
It seems like the market is pretty able and willing to jump services; so if MS does a bad job, I imagine the next Discord or 10 will pop up and we'll move.
Zoom was created by former Cisco Go2Meeting employees who thought they could do better (they could).
It seems like the market is pretty able and willing to jump services; so if MS does a bad job, I imagine the next Discord or 10 will pop up and we'll move.
Zoom was created by former Cisco Go2Meeting employees who thought they could do better (they could).
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Maybe if microsoft buys discord they'll add end to end encryption to it?
https://www.pcgamer.com/how-private-is- ... rd-server/
https://www.pcgamer.com/how-private-is- ... rd-server/
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If Microsoft acquires a company it’s already half dead. If Apple acquires a company, they shut it down and 5 years later release something based on it that isn’t as good.
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MS has been pretty good stewards of GitHub and also Minecraft, they could have really screwed it up and didn't yet.
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At the time, Beam's "Faster than Light" low latency was miles better than Twitch. It enabled the kind of interactivity that twitch streamers are only just now getting onboard with.
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Except this completely ignores that all the existing investors in Discord were there because they wanted a return on their investment. Nothin has actually changed.
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Gone "well", as is Microsoft hasn't completely ruined them, I wonder how they have faired from an ROI perspective for Microsoft though, or is that even a thing anymore?
The economics of these massive deals make as much sense to me as physics at the quantum level, standard intuitive rules do not apply.
I guess in the new world, eyeballs are everything. The LinkedIn acquisition seemed especially insane to me, but apparently that has gone well, better than expected from MS's perspective, I did not see that coming.
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I wish them well with the acquisition. It’s an easy choice for me to delete my account if they go through with it because I don’t need more Microsoft in my life. They are slowly chasing me off their services because they seem to be industry leaders in outages, and I don’t need that in the things I use for pleasure.
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Whilst Valve make a tidy profit from Steam, they are no where near the level of the big players and I seriously doubt they have $10bn lying around - the last estimate we had from Steamspy put the yearly spend on Steam at just over $4bn in 2017 - that's overall spend not Valve's cut which would have been ~$1.2bn, which means Microsoft is 100 times bigger than Valve.
I also expect Valve would be more interested in continuing to develop Steam Chat which can already hook into Steam games.
Regarding the moderation I don't really use Discord but isn't the moderation down to the person who set up that server? - Discord just reminds me of MSN but on a wider scale (though if MSN was still around would people be demanding Microsoft moderated MSN Chats?)
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[I work @ Microsoft, am totally uninvolved in all of this, all comments are my own and personal speculation]
My takes on this in no particular order:
1) Microsoft effectively has no consumer chat offerings, and this would fill a big gap/niche. Teams for consumers is overkill and I believe (based on personal anecdotes) that it's not very popular. Skype is dead in all but name (sorry folks, but c'mon), and so this could be really valuable. It's a well-built and well-loved service with inroads in the gaming, artistic/creative, etc spaces.
1b) I don't think the near-term future of this acquisition would change that trajectory, as I think heavy Microsoft account integration and so on would be relatively slow to materialize and (hopefully) done more deliberately and carefully.
2) While it's easy to look at the botched Skype acquisition and see dire portents I think it's more instructive to look at Microsoft's mega-acquisitions under new leadership ('The Nadella Effect,' if you like). I believe the substantially more hands-off approach taken with LinkedIn, GitHub, etc would likely be repeated with a Discord acquisition. This, in my reading, means that an acquisition might increase tie-ins with Microsoft services (hello Xbox) but it would not simultaneously come with handicapping of non-Microsoft integrations. That particular hegemony strategy isn't currently in favor at the company so I wouldn't expect to see it repeated. The consensus seems to be that both LinkedIn+GitHub acquisitions are going well, so why change what has worked in the past?
3) I'm a Discord Nitro subscriber basically because I get $100/yr of value from Discord. That said, I would imagine that subscription fee could be sort of consumed through other offerings (GamePass + xCloud is a natural fit here in the electronic gaming space).
If you, like me, value the ad-free nature of Discord then a purchase of Discord, and particularly a purchase by a non-advertising company, should be seen as really good news. A different purchaser (Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc) with stronger capability in the consumer ad space would see things very differently here.
4) This is not the same as Google's struggles with chat offerings either as the long lineage of Microsoft's eventual failures in this space are both less numerous and spread over a span of time that is basically double Google's. I also think Google's struggles are substantially more self-inflicted (like killing products people actively enjoy in favor of some new unproven system, vs. slowly letting the products rot) but Microsoft's struggles in the consumer chat/comms space are farcical for other reasons.
My takes on this in no particular order:
1) Microsoft effectively has no consumer chat offerings, and this would fill a big gap/niche. Teams for consumers is overkill and I believe (based on personal anecdotes) that it's not very popular. Skype is dead in all but name (sorry folks, but c'mon), and so this could be really valuable. It's a well-built and well-loved service with inroads in the gaming, artistic/creative, etc spaces.
1b) I don't think the near-term future of this acquisition would change that trajectory, as I think heavy Microsoft account integration and so on would be relatively slow to materialize and (hopefully) done more deliberately and carefully.
2) While it's easy to look at the botched Skype acquisition and see dire portents I think it's more instructive to look at Microsoft's mega-acquisitions under new leadership ('The Nadella Effect,' if you like). I believe the substantially more hands-off approach taken with LinkedIn, GitHub, etc would likely be repeated with a Discord acquisition. This, in my reading, means that an acquisition might increase tie-ins with Microsoft services (hello Xbox) but it would not simultaneously come with handicapping of non-Microsoft integrations. That particular hegemony strategy isn't currently in favor at the company so I wouldn't expect to see it repeated. The consensus seems to be that both LinkedIn+GitHub acquisitions are going well, so why change what has worked in the past?
3) I'm a Discord Nitro subscriber basically because I get $100/yr of value from Discord. That said, I would imagine that subscription fee could be sort of consumed through other offerings (GamePass + xCloud is a natural fit here in the electronic gaming space).
If you, like me, value the ad-free nature of Discord then a purchase of Discord, and particularly a purchase by a non-advertising company, should be seen as really good news. A different purchaser (Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc) with stronger capability in the consumer ad space would see things very differently here.
4) This is not the same as Google's struggles with chat offerings either as the long lineage of Microsoft's eventual failures in this space are both less numerous and spread over a span of time that is basically double Google's. I also think Google's struggles are substantially more self-inflicted (like killing products people actively enjoy in favor of some new unproven system, vs. slowly letting the products rot) but Microsoft's struggles in the consumer chat/comms space are farcical for other reasons.
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I can see them wanting a working hub considering the (improving) clunkiness of windows store + xbox stuff. and i can see discord being ok with the purchase. i do see strategy.
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Huh, I had no idea. I’m sorta surprised that feature didn’t generate more switching back in the Beam era. I guess if you’re a really big time streamer you’re so deluged by communication that the latency is irrelevant.
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Eventually, Steam gets absorbed by Epic, Amazon or Microsoft. Gabe's doing exactly zero innovation on the platform and essentially riding it out, extracting profits. Ever since the failed big screen TV UI push, there's been next to no innovations in the UI, HUD, friends interactions, nothing. My Steam client looks and operates the exact same way it did in 2017.
At this point, I'm convinced Gabe doesn't have it in him to compete in the changing landscape that is PC gaming. If not for the massive install base acquired as an early entrant into the PC market, they would be gone.
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Whoa, whoa, whoa... listen pal. There is no room for rational, level headed thinking around here. Take that crap elsewhere. /s
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Honestly the breakup of the Bell System was the wrong move. Technology was already moving in a direction to allow some actual competition, especially in the long distance (Sprint, MCI) and customer equipment markets. What was needed was a regulatory change to require equal access and choice to all carriers, followed by working to decouple the local connection that was still more technically noncompetitive.
There was a decent argument for splitting off Western Electric on the switching supply side. AT&T's big mistake was not realizing how eroded the customer equipment side already was and overestimating the value of Western Electric as a technology key to their business, and as a result they traded away their local access kingdom to keep a manufacturer that was already behind and eroding from competition
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Nah, Steam's working on ProtonDB, ready to take over the home gaming PC market from Microsoft when they finally decide to charge subscriptions for Windows.
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This seems like a good time to consider Discord's use case: most people I game with was using Mumble or Teamspeak, before Discord came on the scene. Everyone knew that Discord was burning through cash, but it was better than Mumble, because you didn't have to pay a small fee for server hosting. But, gamers will go back to that in a heartbeat if Microsoft buys Discord, and the inevitable crapification comes, like everything else MS touches.
For messaging in the various Discord "communities" that I'm involved in, Discord has replaced Tumblr and other similar messaging & blogging platforms. Again, I think that Microsoft will drive people back to those sorts of sites.
Ultimately, Discord just isn't that valuable to its users, and is easily substitutable. For the users who have said here that they have used Discord for video calls, I'm surprised. Discord is a horrible video calling & streaming service, and is avoided among people I game with.
In the end, it's not about "people want everything for free", it's about "people want value for what they pay for". Value means not ads, data privacy invasion, and crapified apps, things that Microsoft is infamous for. And more consolidation in the tech space is not only not wanted by the general public, but is becoming a political football that the Democratic party can use to score some easy points with their base. There's nothing positive here. (And I love that Microsoft has paid for PR bots to downvote any post that doesn't looooove this!)
For messaging in the various Discord "communities" that I'm involved in, Discord has replaced Tumblr and other similar messaging & blogging platforms. Again, I think that Microsoft will drive people back to those sorts of sites.
Ultimately, Discord just isn't that valuable to its users, and is easily substitutable. For the users who have said here that they have used Discord for video calls, I'm surprised. Discord is a horrible video calling & streaming service, and is avoided among people I game with.
In the end, it's not about "people want everything for free", it's about "people want value for what they pay for". Value means not ads, data privacy invasion, and crapified apps, things that Microsoft is infamous for. And more consolidation in the tech space is not only not wanted by the general public, but is becoming a political football that the Democratic party can use to score some easy points with their base. There's nothing positive here. (And I love that Microsoft has paid for PR bots to downvote any post that doesn't looooove this!)
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The anti-trust angle has been pushed by old media because unlike Microsoft the big tech at risk of anti-trust Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook have taken away their monopolies.
It doesn't matter whether it's Cable and Broadcast TV or Magazines and Newspapers they all made billions with ads and the four big tech companies have heavily crippled those monopolies.
Netflix may have made streaming mainstream but old media could have starved them out by not licencing content but when Amazon and Apple entered the streaming field that was no longer an option
The newspaper business was not delivering news to people.
Their business was running a fleet of trucks that delivered a local monopoly of employment, real estate, classified & auto ads.
Those monopolies are never coming back.
The same is true for anyone who makes money from cable TV whether it's cable companies or the cable channel owners.
We are in the midst of a huge transition for media and many once mainstream options are going to become very niche, which can still make money but not money on the scale the shareholders of these media companies want.
We have seen massive decreases in sales of magazines and newspapers as well as consolidation already but it's only going to get worse.
How many under 30's do you think still buy daily newspapers or weekly/monthly magazines regularly?
We have seen the huge fall in paid TV subscribers sure AT&T is disproportionally responsible but those who leave AT&T aren't going to other paid TV companies. 2020 saw over 5million people in the US end paid TV subscriptions (https://www.leichtmanresearch.com/major ... s-in-2020/) worse than 2019 even though 2020 featured a pandemic that caused many to spend far more time at home.
Erm what was I responding to again? time to end this rant it's 4:00am and time to sleep.
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No different than Standard Oil. Broken up into 34 companies in 1911 and today are all part of either ExxonMobil, Chevron or BP.
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Google should have bought this and baked it into Android. It would have helped both their gaming and social networking services. Mind you, they would have probably ruined it.
I don't really have high hopes for MS either, considering their Xbox apps for Android, plus their apps in general for Xbox One, have been broken/buggy P'sOS...
I don't really have high hopes for MS either, considering their Xbox apps for Android, plus their apps in general for Xbox One, have been broken/buggy P'sOS...
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The word “baking” implies that Google has an attention span long enough to allow the dough to finish rising and be placed in the oven. Not sure I’d agree with that assessment.
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WhiskersWithClaws
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Watching Microsoft apply its business strategy to its XBox arena means I can easily see the company integrating Discord into Teams, or at least modify Discord to use its Teams foundation.
Teams already has video/audio communication built in, and I can also see the service being used to stream videos, something Microsoft has been chomping at the bit with in order to compete/bring in a Twitch clone.
Microsoft isn't buying Discord for its service. It's buying the nearly 7M users who, once purchased, will have little options to move from the service.
That'll be another 7M users Microsoft can annoy the hell out of with popup reminders about using Edge or sign up with a Microsoft account for a "better" experience (which is never the case) as it revamps Discord into what it believes will be "useful".
The issue I have with major purchases like this isn't one of change, but of inept leadership. Nearly most of Microsoft's large acquisitions have failed to produce improved services or growth, which ends up as a death knell for these services in time, forcing them to be shut down.
I have a very serious problem with the inept leadership at Microsoft right now, and can only sit here and say, "Told you so!" once it was announced Nadella would run the company as CEO.
Alas, I'm in a minority with this mindset because Microsoft's billions says "we're doing good".
Of course they are. That's what indefinite, required subscription services to a captive audience with no other options does to revenue streams.
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That's not an unrealistic prognostication. My fear is that by the time Microsoft changes to a subscription-based Windows service, The Big Tech Conglomerate will have succeeded in their careful, slow, and methodical march to change the way we do computing so that everyone has come to accept subscription services simply as "the way it is." For example, many older Adobe users probably utter a curse word when they sign in; many younger Adobe users are more likely to be acclimatized to it without giving it a second thought. Moving to Windows as a subscription will be so slow in transition that when it happens, very few people will have noticed -- or cared.
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The concern is really with Microsoft trying to rope people into their accounts. That'd be the end of Discord. Discord's killer app is that you can always use the identity you want to. If Microsoft doesn't understand that, they'll destroy it and everyone will shift off to another service.[I work @ Microsoft, am totally uninvolved in all of this, all comments are my own and personal speculation]
My takes on this in no particular order:
1) Microsoft effectively has no consumer chat offerings, and this would fill a big gap/niche. Teams for consumers is overkill and I believe (based on personal anecdotes) that it's not very popular. Skype is dead in all but name (sorry folks, but c'mon), and so this could be really valuable. It's a well-built and well-loved service with inroads in the gaming, artistic/creative, etc spaces.
1b) I don't think the near-term future of this acquisition would change that trajectory, as I think heavy Microsoft account integration and so on would be relatively slow to materialize and (hopefully) done more deliberately and carefully.
2) While it's easy to look at the botched Skype acquisition and see dire portents I think it's more instructive to look at Microsoft's mega-acquisitions under new leadership ('The Nadella Effect,' if you like). I believe the substantially more hands-off approach taken with LinkedIn, GitHub, etc would likely be repeated with a Discord acquisition. This, in my reading, means that an acquisition might increase tie-ins with Microsoft services (hello Xbox) but it would not simultaneously come with handicapping of non-Microsoft integrations. That particular hegemony strategy isn't currently in favor at the company so I wouldn't expect to see it repeated. The consensus seems to be that both LinkedIn+GitHub acquisitions are going well, so why change what has worked in the past?
3) I'm a Discord Nitro subscriber basically because I get $100/yr of value from Discord. That said, I would imagine that subscription fee could be sort of consumed through other offerings (GamePass + xCloud is a natural fit here in the electronic gaming space).
If you, like me, value the ad-free nature of Discord then a purchase of Discord, and particularly a purchase by a non-advertising company, should be seen as really good news. A different purchaser (Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc) with stronger capability in the consumer ad space would see things very differently here.
4) This is not the same as Google's struggles with chat offerings either as the long lineage of Microsoft's eventual failures in this space are both less numerous and spread over a span of time that is basically double Google's. I also think Google's struggles are substantially more self-inflicted (like killing products people actively enjoy in favor of some new unproven system, vs. slowly letting the products rot) but Microsoft's struggles in the consumer chat/comms space are farcical for other reasons.
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Microsoft bought Github and yet they've been very hands-off so far.
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The way Mattermost is organised, with chans, semi-permanent voice/ video chat (with a Jitsi server on the side), makes its absence in the above linked list a bit surprising. It would just take proper packaging with a video chat service to make Mattermost a definitive Discord alternative.
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GitHub and LinkedIn are professional services. Discord is a consumer service.
If you don't think the management is looking at them differently, I don't know what to tell you.
I hope they do this GitHub style and just acquire and ignore.
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I’ve never met a single person who speaks fondly of Teamspeak. I share the concern that fee-for-service platforms have a hard time gaining traction, but Discord won because it was the better product (and it wasn’t even close.) Nobody is going back.
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Not really a great comparison. Lync became Skype ... which is becoming Teams. Upgrade progression. Google just whimsically creates something new and maybe cool while whacking that which it forgot without every really supporting it. M$ on the other hand will support a product til it hurts. To the "I still live in the 90s and early aughts" M$ haterz ... this isn't your mom or dads M$. So far at least most of the recent acquisitions (think github or LinkedIN) haven't been saddled with douchey Microsoft stuff (so far). Besides if the choice is Epic or MS ... I'll take MS over Epic.
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Skype was pretty much left as is to their own devices. (It is standalone company owned by Microsoft, same like GitHub)
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It's one thing to have a negative opinion of Microsoft, but the view that these days they're less competent and more amoral than they were in the past is really wild given their recent history.
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It's me, the guy who likes TeamSpeak!
I actually pay for a TeamSpeak server that we use with my friend group for online gaming and stuff. We used to use Discord, but a few years ago they changed something in their audio settings that made it so that with activity detection it was constantly cutting off the beginning of things we were saying. For basically all of us. We were never able to resolve it after months of fiddling, and even would pop back in like a year later to check and it was still doing it.
We actually switched to in-game VOIP for some things like OverWatch where it was pretty decent. TeamSpeak has pretty good and simple echo cancellation and noise reduction settings as well that help as some of them have pretty sensitive area mics.
We do still use the discord server as basically a feed for posting links and memes and videos etc, both while gaming while waiting for a new match, or throughout the day. It's still definitely a cool platform, it just went from being one that had the best free voice chat available to one where I'd rather pay a small fee to use something else for that role.
IMO
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