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> 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

> 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. 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.

robocat 7y ago
> That's what we said about the Skype acquisition too. “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).
- dcabrejas 7y ago
  Let's face it. Microsoft is a business and at any point in the future it might change course if it has economic preasures to do so. It can only keep being "good" as long as it has a stream of money coming in that allows this to happen. So the important thing is how they make npm economically viable. They need to have a good business model. I can only imagine GitHub was economically viable when they bought it, hence they left it run indpendently since it provides a revenue stream.
  - teknopaul 7y ago
    "So the important thing is how they make npm economically viable." 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.
    - skrebbel 7y ago
      > Npm wanted to control nodejs and make money out it. What does this even mean?
      - teknopaul 7y ago
        It means Npm always wanted to be the "one true source" for nodejs code. No matter who wrote the code. 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?
        skrebbel 7y ago
        That's not what I asked. 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.
    - paavohtl 7y ago
      > Npm could easily be an open source client The NPM client is and has always been open source: https://github.com/npm/cli 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?
      - cutemonster 7y ago
        By selling / "doing an exit" to GitHub?
CSMastermind 7y ago
I'm not at Microsoft anymore but I was there when Skype got acquired and I had a bunch of friends who worked on it. 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.
- grandpoobah 7y ago
  Isn't using port 80 a trick to avoid being blocked by firewalls?
  - CSMastermind 7y ago
    People would say that but most firewalls block _incoming_ port 80 connections so that logic never held much weight.
    - abstractbarista 7y ago
      Many networks like in hotels and airplanes only allow out on port 80 or 443.
    - jsight 7y ago
      That isn't really relevant to the problem they were working around. The problem is that many firewalls block outbound ports other than port 80, 443, and some other very common ports. 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.
- Galanwe 7y ago
  > You have to understand that the technology underlying Skype at the time was very brittle and poorly designed. > 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.
2rsf 7y ago
My thoughts as well. I've been at Skype when it was still running semi autonomously, when I left we were part of the office organization.
crtlaltdel 7y ago
i’ve been at three companies that acquired small shops. that 5y horizon to the kill-decision lines up with my experience. most recently i worked with a company (mid size) that had been acquired two years prior by a very large international organization. “its great, they let us do what we do best and are excited to adopt some of our practices”. Two weeks later the senior leadership was shuffled and the mothership was changing things to better match their process, etc.
tikiman163 7y ago
Skype is crap, it was doomed to die around that time frame anyway. If anything, Microsoft Business kept Skype going longer than it would have otherwise. 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.
- Summershard 7y ago
  > Microsoft Teams (Microsofts's surprisingly better clone of Slack) 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.
  - graphememes 7y ago
    I actually enjoy it, more than slack.
  - atraac 7y ago
    Agree, Teams is an absolute shitshow of a communicator. Everything's wrong about it, from unintuitive UX, incredibly slow UI, up to terrible API design where even making a simple bot is laughably hard(try working with 'chats' instead of 'teams' or 'channels' and you'll see). Recent days also proved how bad infrastructure they have, they're not capable at handling bigger traffic at all. I've used Slack equally long before that and it was amazingly good in comparison(still not perfect though).
    - 7y ago

robocat 7y ago

> That's what we said about the Skype acquisition too. “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).

dcabrejas 7y ago
Let's face it. Microsoft is a business and at any point in the future it might change course if it has economic preasures to do so. It can only keep being "good" as long as it has a stream of money coming in that allows this to happen. So the important thing is how they make npm economically viable. They need to have a good business model. I can only imagine GitHub was economically viable when they bought it, hence they left it run indpendently since it provides a revenue stream.
- teknopaul 7y ago
  "So the important thing is how they make npm economically viable." 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.
  - skrebbel 7y ago
    > Npm wanted to control nodejs and make money out it. What does this even mean?
    - teknopaul 7y ago
      It means Npm always wanted to be the "one true source" for nodejs code. No matter who wrote the code. 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?
      - skrebbel 7y ago
        That's not what I asked. 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.
  - paavohtl 7y ago
    > Npm could easily be an open source client The NPM client is and has always been open source: https://github.com/npm/cli 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?
    - cutemonster 7y ago
      By selling / "doing an exit" to GitHub?

CSMastermind 7y ago

I'm not at Microsoft anymore but I was there when Skype got acquired and I had a bunch of friends who worked on it. 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.

grandpoobah 7y ago
Isn't using port 80 a trick to avoid being blocked by firewalls?
- CSMastermind 7y ago
  People would say that but most firewalls block _incoming_ port 80 connections so that logic never held much weight.
  - abstractbarista 7y ago
    Many networks like in hotels and airplanes only allow out on port 80 or 443.
  - jsight 7y ago
    That isn't really relevant to the problem they were working around. The problem is that many firewalls block outbound ports other than port 80, 443, and some other very common ports. 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.
Galanwe 7y ago
> You have to understand that the technology underlying Skype at the time was very brittle and poorly designed. > 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.

2rsf 7y ago

My thoughts as well. I've been at Skype when it was still running semi autonomously, when I left we were part of the office organization.

crtlaltdel 7y ago

i’ve been at three companies that acquired small shops. that 5y horizon to the kill-decision lines up with my experience. most recently i worked with a company (mid size) that had been acquired two years prior by a very large international organization. “its great, they let us do what we do best and are excited to adopt some of our practices”. Two weeks later the senior leadership was shuffled and the mothership was changing things to better match their process, etc.

tikiman163 7y ago

Skype is crap, it was doomed to die around that time frame anyway. If anything, Microsoft Business kept Skype going longer than it would have otherwise. 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.

Summershard 7y ago
> Microsoft Teams (Microsofts's surprisingly better clone of Slack) 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.
- graphememes 7y ago
  I actually enjoy it, more than slack.
- atraac 7y ago
  Agree, Teams is an absolute shitshow of a communicator. Everything's wrong about it, from unintuitive UX, incredibly slow UI, up to terrible API design where even making a simple bot is laughably hard(try working with 'chats' instead of 'teams' or 'channels' and you'll see). Recent days also proved how bad infrastructure they have, they're not capable at handling bigger traffic at all. I've used Slack equally long before that and it was amazingly good in comparison(still not perfect though).
  - 7y ago