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Comment by yosefk | Hacker News Reader

Skype, Nokia, Minecraft, LinkedIn. Also Yahoo, almost, at one point.

Best of luck to Microsoft with its latest acquisition. It doesn't look that sensible though.

Skype is one of the more regrettable acquisitions. Linux support has been deplorable ever since.

At least it does work. Which of course Skype for Business completely doesn't, even in browsers (on Linux). Even then buying a Skype for Business account on Windows it's the most confusing mess as they assume that you're buying the full Office 365 suite and want to take over your email sending. Which contains this massive admin section that's basically empty and doesn't make much sense. So then you end up with some terrible user@blah.microsoftonline.com account which unless you pay for more than the basic package isn't an email address at all. So people still have to manually send you the link for any meeting that you are a part of. Then you have to do a real hunt to find the download for Skype for Business - cause they all assume you just bought the whole Office 365.

I also can't connect to any Skype for Business account via Skype on Linux - just for messaging. That does work for some people for my Skype account on Windows to connect to Skype for Business but half the people don't get my contact requests or they are never shown online.

Of course then there's Slack. Slack works everywhere. On top of that Slack (non-video) calls work almost everywhere except for the Firefox and Desktop apps on Linux.

From Mobile OS/Nokia to Business Chat/Skype, MS has a knack for have all right pieces at the right time and still missing big shifts in the industry.

I saw demos of Surface ( Now PixelSense ) almost a year before the first iPhone was announced. My company was using Skype back in 2006 to do what we do now with Slack. It's amazing how a top tech company can stay on top while consistently being so far behind the curve.

I've always assumed that was part of the embrace-extend-extinguish - "look at this shitty OS, Skype doesn't even work on there; you should use Win X".

Skype already works on OS X (ahem, macOS) and Windows, arguably the only two desktop operating systems with a significant amount of users. It still works on those two operating systems. So what are they extinguishing? And also what are they even embracing? They bought it outright. I don't think EEE, which hasn't really been a MS thing since the 90's, is even the proper term for this at all.

> Linux support has been deplorable ever since.

That is probably a feature, not a bug ;-)

The whole thing has been deplorable since they un-P2P'd it. Terribly performance and call quality.

Fortune 500 companies are replacing their entire physical phone systems with Skype.

For this role OCS worked better before Skype for Business.

We had click-to-call, voicemail, forwarding configuration with Outlook integration. It worked great.

Then we went to 365 and Skype, ostensibly as a cost saving measure, and now none of that works. Big step back.

I mean seriously.

works perfectly for us, and I'm at a Fortune 5 company at the moment.

Does anyone have a reference to even some wild speculation as to what Microsoft gets out of for their own business? Or is this just somewhere to park some cash? I am honestly confused.

More connections to enterprise, potential for some cloud HR play, a ready-established pseudo social network to compete with Facebook for Work (maybe as part of a Yammer, Office365, Skype for Business play), st-tonne of user data, SlideShare...

I'm still confused.

If someone is shopping for a job on LinkedIn, do they want their employer to know that? Isn't there some risk of trust violation? Why would I want to take my online resume and hand it out around work?

I just don't get the synergy plays here. They all feel like a very expensive moonshot.

I connect with colleagues, even my manager when I was at my previous job, even though I found my current role on there. But, think about it from the current plays - they have the work connections (organic "company graph"), the user's skills, your current job details (think about both of those as being an HR play), a learning platform (Lynda, but think of that as internal training/cloud qualifications), industry/enterprise trend information (can dive into the data of all of the roles and build products based on predicting market requirements). Slap on Pulse and SlideShare as publishing and an established (and probably growing) revenue hose from Recruiter and it makes some sense.

If you are looking for a job you just send a private message to a bunch of recruiters or key decision makers e.g. managers. Your employer would never know.

It's not a moonshot at all. LinkedIn is a pretty well understood business.

Unless said employer is LinkedIn (or now MS). I wonder what sort of information they'll be leveraging without telling their employees.

You turn off profile updates.

I feel that over-focus on the interplay undermines core product. Power Point, RDP, Office. Outlook has significantly dropped in usability with introduction of 365. Overforced Win10 with Metro sandboxing undermines usability in many regards, dur to inability to link an action directly, but rather having to open a classic window. Microsoft forgets just how many their core products are used just because of RDP

But Office as a business unit is one of the cores, add in LinkedIn as another business unit - and they're building out the entire business systems ecosystem, end to end. Hiring (LinkedIn), HR (Office + LinkedIn), office productivity (Office), communications (Skype + Sharepoint, WP?), training (Lynda), infrastructure (Azure). Guessing next step will be another attempt at advertising/marketing platform. EDIT: forgot about Dynamics for that last one.

This article explains it pretty well: http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-microsoft-just-bought-linke...

Is Microsoft becoming the official "bad bank" for tech investments?

It's like Corel for B2B.

I think this one makes sense though. I don't know if it's worth the money, but it complements their business approach.

hows minecraft doing for microsoft?

It's consistently the top selling game they have over there, it's continuing to print money at a constant rate (compared to most games which tend to make most of their money around releases).

Merchandising is huge, I imagine its doing very well in that regard.

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