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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft owns 49% of OpenAI so why they should worry? JetBrains just proudly announce that they now use GPT-5 by default.

> going all in at the begining and then losing to the competition

Sure, but there are counter examples too. Microsoft went late to the party of cloud computing. Today Azure is their main money printing machine. At some point Visual Studio seemed to be a legacy app only used for Windows-specific app development. Then they released VSCode and boom! It became the most popular editor by a huge margin[0].

[0]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#most-popular...

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Anecdotally: Azure is the Teams of cloud services - nobody uses it voluntarily or because it's technically the best solution.

They use it because the corporation mandates it.

I’ve used Meet, Slack, Zoom and Teams extensively. Teams beats the others by miles in my opinion.

One day we will be able to have threaded conversations....

Zoom is pretty good for video meetings and especially for video conferences. I've never tried to use it for chat, but I imagine it's pretty lackluster. The really nice thing about teams is that it does both in one place.

But you know what's super underrated and I think could really take a hold on the business world? Discord! The video calls are so good! And multiple streams at the same time? Zoom can't do that!

The channels, too, just blow everything teams has out of the water. The video quality is better, its way faster, has more features, and they actually work. The audio filtering stuff actually works.

I really think with the right marketing they could take over the world. Honestly can't believe they haven't tried it yet.

They would need to do a lot of alterations to make Discord viable in the business world, but I do agree the bones of the platform are miles ahead of Slack or Teams.

It’s a shame they don’t have an enterprise / business tailored product based on it

is this sarcasm? Teams is by far the worst ive used out of those mentioned

Yeah, if it’s not sarcasm, it’s a very good indicator that their opinion should be ignored because no one in their right mind would say Teams is better.

Teams is objectively better, but it's hard to beat the emotional connection that geeks have to Slack from its pre-Salesforce days.

I used to hate Teams but they seem to have fixed it for me.

It works decently enough in web, mobile and desktop.

Well... Slack feels like they have one person working on it dev wise, I havent used Meet in a while, but if its still a in-browser only thing, yikes, and Zoom... that is some legacy feeling app, I dont know how anyone can love Zoom. They bought out KeyBase and didn't even build a better platform. KeyBase was top tier, I'm still sour that the dev team basically stopped maintaining KeyBase after Zoom bought them out.

Teams took the best bits from Skype and whatever that other service Microsoft had for businesses and their phones and started over basically.

I still have pet peeves about Teams (like why dont the 'Teams' within Teams have proper group chats like Slack would, its ridiculous!) but it could be way worse. After years of screensharing hell I can finally move the stupid top bar out of my way when trying to hit 'Debug' within Visual Studio at least.

Keybase works entirely fine to this day. What sucks is everyone stopped using it solely to retaliate against the acquisition with thin justifications in speculation that Zoom would ruin keybase. Well that didn't happen, Keybase’s own users ruined Keybase. And now everyone just uses Discord because I guess the encryption didn't actually matter when it counted. Sad but familiar security story.

Agree. I stopped using it because its basically frozen, I dont think they've done any updates, the lights are on but nobody's home.

If anyone who was an original stakeholder for Keybase is reading this, please bring it back in some way someday. I'm assuming Zoom probably made you guys sign some insane non-compete sadly.

In a sea of garbage chat services all built using Electron and other bloatware, Keybase was a breath of fresh air.

You are joking right?

Partially, I still consider the Web shell and VSCode based editing experience the best of clound vendors as replacement from what started to me as telnet and X forwarding on the university DG/UX servers.

AWS is the worst of this experience, even IBM Cloud has better tooling in this regard, GCP is somehow in the middle, others like Vercel/Netlify naturally don't offer this kind of setup.

Azure isn’t great but AWS continues to be worse by a mile. I don’t know why anyone puts up with their terrible SDKs and poor documentation.

IMO Firebase should be the gold standard of how to do cloud platforms

The fact that you're talking about SDKs and comparing AWS to Firebase... probably means that your usecase is very specific and explains why you don't like AWS.

Fwiw, it was AWS that started the serverless hypetrain and kept pushing it until ppl started to forget what AWS was known for up to that point

I'm assuming if you use Firebase you get Google's customer support (or lack thereof)

Truer words have never been spoken. Every time I hear an exec say we're a Microsoft shop so we've got to use copilot/Azure, I wonder if they hear themselves.

Visual Studio is a bad example. It's used for Windows, Web, and Mobile. The big difference between the two is the cost. Visual Studio Pro is $100/month, Enterprise is $300/month, while VSCode is free. It was an incredibly smart marketing play by Microsoft to do that.

> Microsoft owns 49% of OpenAI

Power at OpenAI seems orthogonal to ownership, precedent or even frankly their legal documents.

  > At some point Visual Studio seemed to be a legacy app only used for Windows-specific app development. Then they released VSCode and boom!

I'm not sure what the point is. Visual Studio is still Windows-only; VS Code is not related to it in any shape or form, the name is deliberately misleading.

> VS Code is not related to it in any shape or form Except they are made by the same company? and literally own the trademark for both?

Oracle literally own the trademark for both Java and JavaScript.

The point is MS was so, so, so late to the party of cross-platform developer tools. And then suddenly they won the game.

Ah, it makes total sense to me now. Thanks.

It really helps that VSCode isn't intrinsically tied to any other Microsoft products. It doesn't demand you use any specific platforms/languages/compilers, it doesn't demand you use GitHub, it runs on all major operating systems in basically the same way, it doesn't demand or even politely ask that you sign into a Microsoft account.

If it weren't for the name, you'd never know it was even a Microsoft product.

Indeed I heard directly from someone involved that the VS Code team understood the reputation of Visual Studio and wanted to call the product “Code” instead, and the compromise with marketing leadership was the the binary was called “code”.

Visual studio is good though. I wish I could it use it instead of code or Xcode

I use it 5 days a week, and unless you're talking about an ancient version from the 90s, I don't understand how you can say that.

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