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Comment by karpodiem | Hacker News Reader

Now I've heard it all - a company with a seven hundred billion dollar market cap can't afford it. Come on. They can absolutely afford to do native Windows / MacOS / Linux cross platform. They're lazy/don't want to.

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> Now I've heard it all - a company with a seven hundred billion dollar market cap can't afford it. Come on. They can absolutely afford to do native Windows / MacOS / Linux cross platform. They're lazy/don't want to.

That’s a straw man argument. The parent said that Linux development might not be worth the cost. They didn’t say anything about the ability to pay.

So we, linux users, actively promoting alternatives for Skype, to increase cost of ignoring us.

«Team, M$ killed Skype for linux, I cannot use it anymore, let switch to something else, like Slack.»

They can afford it. They can also afford to put a man on the moon, but it isn't necessarily financially reasonable for them to do so. Think of Microsoft as a collection of teams, each team can't afford to spend "Microsoft" money on its project unless its strategically important. The fact that we don't have native app probably indicates that Microsoft thinks Skype is past its peak of popularity. Thinking of many competing products I understand why.

They can do it but if it's not profitable, they won't. It's not being lazy, it's being smart in the capitalist sense.

I'm fine with that, just call it like it is. This is what Microsoft truly thinks of developing a 1st class open-source solution - not worth their time because it's not profitable enough. So they'll give you a second class solution with the assumption you'd rather have that then nothing.

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