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Comment by jackfoxy | Hacker News Reader

Pure speculation, it would not surprise me to wake up someday and see MS has bought Stackoverflow. Given their direction of integrating the entire developer experience, it would make sense. MS is upgrading technical docs across the board, organizing and linking to SO content would make sense.

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In light of StackOverflow looking for a new CEO, layoffs in the past year and a half, $68 million in venture capital looking for a return, and Joel Spolsky's connections to Microsoft, this might actually happen.

I've also gotten the impression that StackOverflow's recruiting product isn't doing so well. It seems to be a few hundred dollars a month for a single job posting, but the results for recruiters are apparently mixed.

LinkedIn seems like a good fit

Well they're already owned by Microsoft, so same deal =P

I think they use SQL Server as well so there’s that poster child angle as well.

And C#.

Pretty sure it was developed entirely on the MS stack. Jeff Atwood had a few posts about it. At the beginning it was literally one Windows Server machine.

SO is primarily MS Dev stack.

StackOverflow for Teams seems like a really hard sell too. $5-10/user/mo is pretty steep, especially for a service that needs a significant-size userbase to "work".

Just seen it adopted in a F50. It's not particularly difficult to sell in my opinion. The product is pretty good too.

We use StackOverflow for Teams with a small team (<15 developers) and it’s been great. While I’m sure our revenue alone won’t make it profitable, I think it’s a product that can work with teams of all sizes. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.

I've had great success finding devs for my company on SO. I would hate to see it go away.

LinkedIn and Github didn't go away.

You might say StackOverflow careers isn’t doing well, but it is literally the only jobs listing outside of this website that I look at. The ability to get a succinct email within a chosen SALARY RANGE and being able to select remote only is AWESOME.

If I remember correctly, my team of four was quoted at $13k/yr for the StackOverflow job posting / recruiting solution.

It's probably worth it for companies with greater hiring needs than ours, but LinkedIn (begrudgingly), and ZipRecruiter have provided enough quality candidate-flow for far less money that it doesn't make any sense for our uses.

The stack at SO is heavy on MS tech too. I believe they run a lot of SQLServer.

All asp.net/core as well

Truth, I was at SO in Manhattan for a JS meetup a couple times and all the desktop computers were PCs with Dell monitors.Not a single Mac in sight. Have a feeling they weren't running linux either since Stack Overflow is .NET I believe.

I remember many many years ago listening to the Stack Overflow podcast which was Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky talking, in real time, about them creating Stack Overflow.

IIRC it uses ASP.Net MVC or something like that, and might have been the first and/or biggest site using it?

Lots of details on StackOverflow’s architecture here: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...

> running linux either since Stack Overflow is .NET I believe

It is a matter of taste and I'm sure these guys (Atwood/Spolsky) love Windows to work on, but with .NET Core (we started porting when the first stable ASP.NET Core came out), we ported/migrated everything from Windows/MS (SQL server, Windows Server, AD, etc) to Linux + MySQL/Postgresql on ASP.NET Core.

I guess it's what you are used to, but everything is faster, smoother, more stable/consistent and easier to manage now. I would never go back.

Have we been reading the same MSDN?

It is still really unorganized in many ways. The worst thing, I think, is search results still frequently list obsolete MSDN pages higher...and, btw, the new branding is not MSDN, but docs.microsoft.com. They still have a long ways to go, with the typical problems of a large organization tackling a large, kind of amorphous, project.

docs.microsoft.com PM here - thanks for the feedback! It takes some time to update all our search results across the two major search engines. Given that some pages have less traction than others, the more obscure content sometimes still is indexed as if it's coming from MSDN.

We have moved most of the library to docs, with redirects in place, so hopefully you won't get too many 404s. If you do - feel free to report them here: https://aka.ms/sitefeedback, and we'll address them.

> the two major search engines

What's the second major search engine?

I'm genuinely asking, not meaning to poke if it's Bing - I use DDG but just don't have a feel at all for what's most popular after the obvious one.

Wikipedia has just 7% market share left for the second, and the rest - thinking about it's probably one that's popular in China and unheard of elsewhere?

Considering Verizon has stated their Yahoo and AOL properties are worthless[0], it's probably Bing and the search engines that rely on it (including DDG).

0; https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/verizon-signals-its-y...

I was referring to Bing and Google - not because I am trying to omit anything, but rather because these are the two I use the most on the day-to-day.

DDG is just Bing, so when Bing updates its results so will DDG.

What is the first search engine?

Baidu in China. Yandex in Russia. Google in the US. Not sure for India and Latin America.

The poster was probably thinking of Bing though, which is ironic because it's maybe less used than these.

I was assuming a global perspective, for which Google is obviously first. (And I quoted Wikipedia confirming that at a shade under 93% market share.)

Funny thing, you're describing exactly why you're not assuming a global perspective. Forget about a first, the world is fragmented. To be global is precisely to cater to individual locations around the world.

If we are to believe these stats, Google is at 3% market share in China. It's basically non existent. http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/chi...

Microsoft has developers everywhere in the world, who need docs. There are major search engines besides Google and Bing.

Okay, so s/global/whatever you want me to say, for what you definitely know that I mean.

Question: Why is Offline documentation and the Help Viewer in Visual Studio 2017 still horribly broken? I keep it around for when I don’t have internet access but it’s next to useless. Why keep up the pretence? (In comparison, the CHM and DocEx from VS6 through VS2008 work perfectly and are very reliable)

What particular aspect of it is broken? Genuinely asking the question, because I want to make sure we address major issues in the customer experience that you have.

Massive amounts of duplicated content. Broken images and stylesheets. I’ve downloaded all content but pressing F1 on a symbol in VS informs me the content is only available online.

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