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0 pointsamarant3mo ago0 comments

Not quite everywhere. There's a common denominator for all of those: Microsoft.

Their business is buying good products and turning them into shit, while wringing every cent they can out of the business. Always has been.

They have a grace period of about 2-4 years after acquisition where interference is minimal. Then it ramps up. How long a product can survive once the interference begins largely depends on how good senior leadership at that product company is at resisting the interference. It's a hopeless battle, the best you can do is to lose slowly.

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vbezhenar2mo ago

I remember how crazy Skype originally was.

At my first company we used Skype to communicate with each other. Mostly chats and files.

One day our internet cable to the office got cut by someone. Well, we didn't realize that for some time, because Skype just continued to work without Internet. It was like a miracle. It was unique software, there's nothing like it even today.

I think that the first thing Microsoft did after they bought Skype is making Internet mandatory, probably to spy on all chats.

Andrex3mo ago

Things don't always ramp up after 2-4 years. Sometimes MS just kills the project or company after that period of time.

See also their moves in the gaming industry.

amarantOP3mo ago

Heh, I was working at 2 of those gaming companies when they were acquired by m$. I almost fear taking another job in the gaming industry, there seems to be some kind of bastardised version of Murphy's law that any gaming company that hires me will be acquired by ms 6 months later.

I mean, that's obviously not the case, but it's weird that it happened twice!

Andrex2mo ago

Very weird it happened twice! But that's a kind of a cool factoid to tell people haha.

Even with devs and publishers that don't die or are killed, they still lay hundreds off when a game is done. Then the studio limps along in pre-production mode on their next game for 4-5 years it seems like...

Maybe the only job stability in the industry is with indies, and... Nintendo?

amarantOP2mo ago

I'd add the hugely successful studios to that list. Even after ms acquisition, to the best of my knowledge neither of the 2 studios I worked at had any layoffs.

But they boast the most sold video game in the history of videogames (Tetris a close-ish second), and most downloaded free mobile game, respectively. Each have player bases larger than the population of the country they're from!

Here's to hoping ms is hesitant to gut either!

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its_magic3mo ago

I for one am shocked--SHOCKED, I say!--to learn that anything bad could happen as a result of a) putting everything in "the cloud" and b) handing control over the entire world's source code to the likes of Microsoft.

Who could have POSSIBLY foreseen any kind of dire consequences?

endgame2mo ago

Nobody. Nobody at all could have seen it. Microsoft is cool now, haven't you seen VSCode? They do Open Source, they run Linux, they've joined the fold, the tiger shed its stripes.

danny_codes2mo ago

Ironically they are enshitifying vscode too. Even products them make themselves can’t survive long.

tosti2mo ago

More like a wolf in sheep clothing

whstl2mo ago

You're obviously being sarcastic, but for the longest time the dominant position of a huge chunk of HN (and the tech world in general) has been that the cloud is the answer to any problem, and that anything deviating from it is either impossible, too expensive or too stupid.

After a generation of indoctrinated people, Microsoft (or any FAANG really) can't even afford to do anything differently.

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