15 ms·

Why Microsoft Wants Discord

62 points by ibraheemdev 6y ago

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
Discord is capable of organic growth. Teams isn't.
- jariel 6y ago
  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.
  - notsureaboutpg 6y ago
    Those are really good points, especially the latter one
pityJuke 6y ago
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.
- throwaway123x2 6y ago
  That would be a nightmare. It currently takes anywhere between 2 and 5 redirects to log into one of my MSFT accounts.
  - bluefirebrand 6y ago
    Don't forget the password reset.
  - goalieca 6y ago
    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.
- pndy 6y ago
  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.
  - pityJuke 6y ago
    > 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-users-safety-center-video-voice-chat https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/30/21308194/discord-gaming-u...
    - pndy 6y ago
      Sure but if purchased Microsoft can have own plans regarding Discord
GoblinSlayer 6y ago
> "Creation, creation, creation" said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Microsoft knows its mantras well.
- cronix 6y ago
  In this case, they bought it, bought it, bought it.
- gruez 6y ago
  context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaVTHG-Ev4k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaVTHG-Ev4k
gautamcgoel 6y ago
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.
- jtew396 6y ago
  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.
  - enumjorge 6y ago
    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.
    - tracedddd 6y ago
      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.
      - HappySweeney 6y ago
        I think compared to Microsoft's offer, no.
      - xboxnolifes 6y ago
        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.
  - 6y ago
endisneigh 6y ago
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?
- hpoe 6y ago
  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
  - potatoman22 6y ago
    Or the chat product space is just constantly evolving, so older platforms inevitably get left behind after radically new ones pop up.
  - xboxnolifes 6y ago
    I don't think that companies are bad at making chat. I think that chat is difficult to make profitable to maintain.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  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.
- gryn 6y ago
  > 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.
- 6y ago
flerchin 6y ago
Embrace Extend Extinguish.
- pixelbath 6y ago
  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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
JulianMorrison 6y ago
They shouldn't be allowed to have it
bgorman 6y ago
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.
p-sharma 6y ago
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?
- aeturnum 6y ago
  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.
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  Maybe by buying developer / enterprise goodwill with acquisitions of GitHub and LinkedIn (and now Discord), they're hoping those developers will be more likely to build for MS products, Windows, etc? Maybe the tech and the team behind Discord (an app which runs far better than Microsoft Teams while offering voice / real time chat, multiple organizations, integrations, bots, etc.) are valuable to Microsoft to utilize that knowledge across their other products and services?
- 6y ago
jehlakj 6y ago
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?
- michaelbuckbee 6y ago
  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.
bluecalm 6y ago
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.
- pja 6y ago
  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.)
jacob420dad 6y ago
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?
smitty1e 6y ago
MS already has GitHub and Yammer, too.
- croutonwagon 6y ago
  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.
  - smitty1e 6y ago
    It's alive within consultancies that are chained to MrSoftie. They seem to be integrating it with Teams.

62 points by ibraheemdev 6y ago

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago

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

jariel 6y ago
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.
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  Those are really good points, especially the latter one

pityJuke 6y ago

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.

throwaway123x2 6y ago
That would be a nightmare. It currently takes anywhere between 2 and 5 redirects to log into one of my MSFT accounts.
- bluefirebrand 6y ago
  Don't forget the password reset.
- goalieca 6y ago
  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.
pndy 6y ago
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.
- pityJuke 6y ago
  > 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-users-safety-center-video-voice-chat https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/30/21308194/discord-gaming-u...
  - pndy 6y ago
    Sure but if purchased Microsoft can have own plans regarding Discord

GoblinSlayer 6y ago

> "Creation, creation, creation" said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Microsoft knows its mantras well.

cronix 6y ago
In this case, they bought it, bought it, bought it.
gruez 6y ago
context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaVTHG-Ev4k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaVTHG-Ev4k

gautamcgoel 6y ago

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.

jtew396 6y ago
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.
- enumjorge 6y ago
  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.
  - tracedddd 6y ago
    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.
    - HappySweeney 6y ago
      I think compared to Microsoft's offer, no.
    - xboxnolifes 6y ago
      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.
- 6y ago

endisneigh 6y ago

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?

hpoe 6y ago
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
- potatoman22 6y ago
  Or the chat product space is just constantly evolving, so older platforms inevitably get left behind after radically new ones pop up.
- xboxnolifes 6y ago
  I don't think that companies are bad at making chat. I think that chat is difficult to make profitable to maintain.
leetcrew 6y ago
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.
gryn 6y ago
> 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.
6y ago

flerchin 6y ago

Embrace Extend Extinguish.

pixelbath 6y ago
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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

JulianMorrison 6y ago

They shouldn't be allowed to have it

bgorman 6y ago

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.

p-sharma 6y ago

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?

aeturnum 6y ago
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.
notsureaboutpg 6y ago
Maybe by buying developer / enterprise goodwill with acquisitions of GitHub and LinkedIn (and now Discord), they're hoping those developers will be more likely to build for MS products, Windows, etc? Maybe the tech and the team behind Discord (an app which runs far better than Microsoft Teams while offering voice / real time chat, multiple organizations, integrations, bots, etc.) are valuable to Microsoft to utilize that knowledge across their other products and services?
6y ago

jehlakj 6y ago

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?

michaelbuckbee 6y ago
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.

bluecalm 6y ago

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.

pja 6y ago
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.)

jacob420dad 6y ago

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?

smitty1e 6y ago

MS already has GitHub and Yammer, too.

croutonwagon 6y ago
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.
- smitty1e 6y ago
  It's alive within consultancies that are chained to MrSoftie. They seem to be integrating it with Teams.