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I wonder if they have received any buyout offers lately. Their business model doesn't seem to be as successful as it should be (given how much their site is use

by easton 6y ago

I wonder if they have received any buyout offers lately. Their business model doesn't seem to be as successful as it should be (given how much their site is used), but it seems like they'd be an ideal candidate for a company that wanted to make inroads with developers, like Microsoft. And the site does already run on IIS. Perhaps I should start a Bureau of the Atomic Scientists-esque doomsday clock[0] for the minutes until Microsoft buys Canonical and Stack Overflow and completes their trifecta of modern dev tooling companies with GitHub. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

shagie 6y ago
I want to say "with the direction that SO Teams took - no." Its not that SO Teams is a bad thing, just that it isn't the thing that the other companies want to buy. Look at Microsoft - its got a large work productivity suite (MS Teams, Office, Sharepoint) - all of which are more more mature than Stack Overflow in terms of developer experience. And then there's GitHub and its got GitHub Discussions ( https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/104 https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/104 ) on its roadmap for the near future. SO would be conflicting with that... and then there's the rest of the SE network that has nothing that a hypothetical MS buyer would want. And SO Jobs competes with LinkedIn. At best it would be an accuhire... but a lot of the developer knowledge has either left or been fired. Google is the other option. But then... Google is trying to do its own venture into worker productivity. SO (and the SE Network) would kind of help that and making it searchable... but its really not that interesting of a target beyond all that content (and Google doesn't really like managing content of their own). And elsewhere on HN today you can see what Google thinks of maintaining information... why would they want to buy it when they can get search clicks for free? Google has no need to buy SO as an accuhire... and again, most of what is there seems to be sales rather than engineering (look at job postings https://stackoverflow.com/company/work-here#positions https://stackoverflow.com/company/work-here#positions ) The blog post seems to suggest that SO wants to go up head to head with Zoom, Atlassian, Slack and Microsoft for the team productivity area. That feels like a "too little, too late" for the direction that they're looking at. As an aside - look at the benefits on https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/stack-overflow https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/stack-overflow - the free lunch from in house chef and proclaiming great chairs feels (at least to me) more of a startup that is spending money because it got it.

by easton 6y ago

shagie 6y ago

I want to say "with the direction that SO Teams took - no." Its not that SO Teams is a bad thing, just that it isn't the thing that the other companies want to buy. Look at Microsoft - its got a large work productivity suite (MS Teams, Office, Sharepoint) - all of which are more more mature than Stack Overflow in terms of developer experience. And then there's GitHub and its got GitHub Discussions ( https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/104 https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/104 ) on its roadmap for the near future. SO would be conflicting with that... and then there's the rest of the SE network that has nothing that a hypothetical MS buyer would want. And SO Jobs competes with LinkedIn. At best it would be an accuhire... but a lot of the developer knowledge has either left or been fired. Google is the other option. But then... Google is trying to do its own venture into worker productivity. SO (and the SE Network) would kind of help that and making it searchable... but its really not that interesting of a target beyond all that content (and Google doesn't really like managing content of their own). And elsewhere on HN today you can see what Google thinks of maintaining information... why would they want to buy it when they can get search clicks for free? Google has no need to buy SO as an accuhire... and again, most of what is there seems to be sales rather than engineering (look at job postings https://stackoverflow.com/company/work-here#positions https://stackoverflow.com/company/work-here#positions ) The blog post seems to suggest that SO wants to go up head to head with Zoom, Atlassian, Slack and Microsoft for the team productivity area. That feels like a "too little, too late" for the direction that they're looking at. As an aside - look at the benefits on https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/stack-overflow https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/stack-overflow - the free lunch from in house chef and proclaiming great chairs feels (at least to me) more of a startup that is spending money because it got it.