4 ms·

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

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?
dillondoyle 6y ago
I might guess also better integration with their games products, identity integration, expanding on the growing in game/streaming ads market e.g. Unity. App install ads on consoles or future mobile platforms. Plus just more lucrative ads on Discord expanding (or including if they don't have) in stream video. MSFT already has a crappy ad network but they have a lot of addressable potential. Maybe they have a larger streaming vision and this is a way to build streaming content, or console CTV media channels paying and assisting premium creators like YouTube. A lot of these streams end up on youtube already.
GoblinSlayer 6y ago
It's ok if you don't know how to monetize the network effect. Microsoft does.

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?

dillondoyle 6y ago

I might guess also better integration with their games products, identity integration, expanding on the growing in game/streaming ads market e.g. Unity. App install ads on consoles or future mobile platforms. Plus just more lucrative ads on Discord expanding (or including if they don't have) in stream video. MSFT already has a crappy ad network but they have a lot of addressable potential. Maybe they have a larger streaming vision and this is a way to build streaming content, or console CTV media channels paying and assisting premium creators like YouTube. A lot of these streams end up on youtube already.

GoblinSlayer 6y ago

It's ok if you don't know how to monetize the network effect. Microsoft does.