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Microsoft Businesses

Microsoft in Talks To Buy Discord for More Than $10 Billion (bloomberg.com) 84

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Microsoft is in talks to acquire Discord, a video-game chat community, for more than $10 billion, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Discord has been talking to potential buyers and software giant Microsoft is in the running, but no deal is imminent, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. Discord is more likely to go public than sell itself, one person said. Representatives for Microsoft and Discord declined to comment. VentureBeat reported earlier on Monday that Discord was engaged in sales talks. San Francisco-based Discord is best known for its free service that lets gamers communicate by video, voice and text, and people stuck at home during the pandemic have increasingly used its technology for study groups, dance classes, book clubs and other virtual gatherings. It has more than 100 million monthly active users and has been elaborating its communication tools to turn it into a "place to talk" rather than merely a gamer-centric chat platform.
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Microsoft in Talks To Buy Discord for More Than $10 Billion More

Microsoft in Talks To Buy Discord for More Than $10 Billion

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  • Perfect (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

    I already don't use Discord because their client is garbage.

    Now I can also not use it because it's Microsoft. Assuming the sale goes through, which it probably will.

    • And I've moved exclusively to Discord because it's better than any other free messaging/voice/video client I've found.

      It would kill me if MS took it over and Skyped it.

  • A "Place to talk" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Stonent1 ( 594886 ) <stonent&stonent,pointclark,net> on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @09:11AM (#61188900) Journal
    So Microsoft wants to wade into the minefield of big tech censorship in online discussions?

    • This is what makes it interesting. So far the only ones Microsoft has deplatformed have been youtube-dl but that was to hurt indy media before the election (RIAA was a canard). There is some talk that the Github people were scared and by time corporate lawyers saw it, they told them to replatform youtube-dl but some critical time was lost (Google changed the YouTube layout to break youtube-dl, seemingly in coordination with RIAA. Anyway, the damage was done in the critical pre-election period so that was

  • Well that's that then (Score:3)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @09:16AM (#61188908)

    I was hoping Discord would do something about their client but there's no hope of that now.

  • Given their track record with MSN and Skype... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Z80a ( 971949 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @09:21AM (#61188922)

    It's probably time to move again.

  • Maybe we will get something that is more open and 95% as good now.
    Unless there is something like that I haven't heard about.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ahodgson ( 74077 )

      Microsoft. More open. Yeah that's gonna happen. Say bye-bye Linux client for starters.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dow ( 7718 )

        I assumed he meant that if Discord goes to Microsoft, then the open-source community will step up and make an Open Discord-like platform that is 95% as good. I just can't tell with the comments these days. Was it sarcasm?

        As for the Linux client... well they do a Linux client for Microsoft Teams. I was surprised myself when I had a Teams meeting to attend and it was there to download from Microsoft, and even more surprised when it worked perfectly, first time, webcam and microphone.

  • And they wants to find another chat service people like. Since slack isn't available, next is Discord.

    Zoom, frankly, would be wise to pickup Discord.

  • That really the only thing I can see Microsoft getting from this.
    They already have the Xbox and the Store to sell games.
    Teams is already their chat client. Pair it down some and move some elements around and you would have the Discord client.
    Microsoft will be unable to fix the 2 biggest gripes I have with Discord. The UI has always been bad and it always has been slow.
    • You are forgetting the millions of users that MS will drive away with their bungling like they did with Skype. Skype was not perfect but it worked adequately on many platforms. But like many things MS acquire, the infrastructure was not MS centric so they had to keep "fixing" it until everything was broken and buggy and no longer worked.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ahodgson ( 74077 )

      Yeah it's just a pile of users they'll force onto Teams after they kill Discord.

    • The feels like a defensive move on Microsoft's part to help stymie a potential Teams competitor.

      I can definitely see Discord already creeping unofficially into businesses, being used by junior staff members as an out of band collaboration platform. The last thing Microsoft really wants is young people growing up in a different platform and then injecting it as a competitor.

      • Re:$10,000,000,000 for a name (Score:5, Interesting)

        by _xeno_ ( 155264 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @11:35AM (#61189472) Homepage Journal

        It's a defensive move but it has more to do with user share than killing a competitor. Microsoft is terrified that the next generation of users - the "Gen Z" crowd - are going to be primarily phone users, and Microsoft does not own the phone. They've been shopping around for social networks (the article mentions Microsoft's attempts to buy Tiktok and Pinterest) because they know that for the younger crowd, these platforms are more important than the OS they use. If you can access all you need on a Chromebook, why bother with Windows?

        So yes, it's all about younger users, but I think Microsoft is more interested in purchasing access to them than they are about killing the platform. It doesn't mean they wouldn't run it into the ground (it's Microsoft, of course they would), but it does mean that their interests aren't in removing a competitor as much as moving users inside their ecosystem, one that they see becoming increasingly irrelevant in the future.

  • Microsoft acquisition automatically causes the value proposition of any property to drop like a stone. This is what happened to LinkedIn as Microsoft's desperate focus on monetization locked all the useful features behind a paywall.

    Microsoft will attempt to do the same for Discord and people will abandon it because Microsoft will thoroughly fuck it.

    Also, Microsoft can't design a user interface to save their lives. I'm beginning to think they farm out their development to 3rd world code shops because the

  • MS Teams chat functionality is hot garbage and years behind Slack.

    Discord on the other hand is very functional, although it is missing some key features Enterprise users would need.

    Microsoft buying Discord and using it to replace the Teams chat function could marry the best of both worlds. This is surely their gameplan.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tom ( 822 )

      I see a MASSIVE move towards Teams in the business sphere all around me. I rarely saw a product being adopted so fast by so many, I'm almost wondering how to get in on the deal and profit from that bribe money M$ must be throwing around.

      Really sad. It's like watching Erdogan invade Syria and you can't do anything. :-(

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by brunes69 ( 86786 )

        It's because if you have an Enterprise Microsoft 365 subscription, it's essentially free because it is part of the bundle.

        It's hard to fight against free, even if you have a superior specific product, such as Slack or Zoom.

        BTW, does Microsoft bundling free products in with other product lines where they have a monopoly position, remind you of any past market behaviour???

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by j-beda ( 85386 )

          It is also included as part of any Microsoft 365 Business subscription - even the least expensive "Microsoft 365 Business Basic" license for $5 USD/month.

    • MS teams Chat is fine. It's just the layout is atrocious. They just need to modify the CSS to reduce the space used up by each message.

      That being said, I kind of feel like Teams chat is just intended to be used very very differently from Slack or Discord. It's not a "Chat" it's a shared email client. When you view it how it's "intended" to be used it actually works well. I only just discovered that after being subjected to an atrocious implementation of Slack in an organization that was completely and

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by brunes69 ( 86786 )

        I think you and I live in a different universe if you think Teams threads better than Slack.

      • The big problem I have with Teams chat is that it's almost impossible to access the chat history in any reasonable manner. Scrolling up to view old messages is so slow and clunky, and in a very typical Microsoft way the search function is practically useless, not to mention also godawfully slow. And I wouldn't be hard to please, just let me download the chat history into something like a .csv file and I'd be totally fine with that.

  • Can someone please explain how Discord make money? And why MS is buying Discord?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Lando ( 9348 )

      Discord makes money by charging for extras, icons, user rights, extra services, but discord by itself is fine for communicating, it's sort of the free-to-play model and they make their money off of bling. As to why MS is considering buying them, market share. Microsoft is dominate in their areas, so they have to branch out to get more users, adding a new service with an established user base helps acquire more users. Microsoft plays the long game going for long term gain. Probably looking at recouping

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        so they have to branch out to get more users, adding a new service with an established user base helps acquire more users. Microsoft plays the long game going for long term gain.

        I think you spelled "murdering a competitor" wrong there.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Disk-Gourd (Score:2, Funny)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 )

    I discussed the problems of online bullying when a month explained to me that her daughter was on "disk-gourd" and another girl kept telling her to kill herself. She wanted to know what "disk-gourd" was and why it was so shitty.

    I told her it's like AOL chat, and that people have always been shitty when allowed online anonymously and teenagers especially lean towards sociopath tendencies. After that we shared frowny face reactions.

  • If MS buys Discord that is the end of it (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    MS has a track record of destroying or at least severely crippling anything that they buy. Look at what happened to Skype?
    Before MS it was at least usable. Afterwards? Fat Chance.

    Proudly MS free since 2016

  • Microsoft will gut the company and take what it wants. RIP Discord.

  • I can see the future as if it were yesterday (Score:5, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @10:46AM (#61189216)

    1) Microsoft buys Discord
    2) For a year or two, they mostly leave it alone
    3) Microsoft starts actively messing with it, forcing traffic to run through their own servers
    4) Microsoft rebrands it as "Teams for Business"
    5) Microsoft spends several years thoroughly screwing up the code on both Teams and Teams for Business, bloating both even further and introducing lots of new bugs in failed pursuit of interoperability
    6) End users by the millions flee to competitors' offerings
    7) After a few more years and a hemorrhaging user base, Microsoft announces EOL for both products while they also announce a new product designed to (poorly) replicate features from competing products

    • I'd like to PM you about picking my next batch of lottery numbers. Your response is on the money!
    • Yup, that's pretty much their standard business model at this point. "Embrace and Extend" can kiss my shiny metal antitrust.
    • My thoughts exactly. I remember the days when skype was a great little peer to peer app that everyone was on. Ditched that around 9 years ago, knowing they'd royally screw it up,

  • Congratulations, idiots (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @10:53AM (#61189258) Homepage Journal

    Once again, users picked a product instead of a protocol. Now you're pwned.

    • And I imagine people said the same thing about Github. So how's that working out so far?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        And I imagine people said the same thing about Github. So how's that working out so far?

        Uh? Git is a protocol. Your point is that people can leave it for competitors anytime, and therefore it's a completely different situation?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      And why? My guess us that a lot if users don’t know what a protocol is, they just want to voice chat an share pics with friends, so ofc they’re not looking for that ( tech babble) thing, they want a product. I’ll bet that 70% of duscord users started using discird becaues a frien used it, ir because yeir favorite streamer plugged ther discord ad nausium

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jwdb ( 526327 )

      Any suggestions for modern, open protocols? Asking seriously - tried xmpp and matrix, still using the latter but it's hard to get others on.

      Problem, as I see it, is that the open protocols are either old (lacking features) or have implementations that are not as good as those of the proprietary products. Interfaces are hard, and the proprietary world often screws it up as well (hello, MS Skype), but I clearly see the appeal of Discord over, say, Element.

      To be honest, I don't mind platform-hopping every few

  • So let's be the smart rats and abandon ship as soon as that deal is signed.

    The important question is what the best alternatives are. Anyone got a favorite?

  • I use Discord because my one friend in the gaming group set up a "discord server" which of course is only a separate set of rooms and controls running on the main infrastructure. Seeing as how we play a M$-owned game, my friends probably wouldn't mind if M$ also owned Discord, but maybe somehow I could leverage this into using some infrastructure I control. I was thinking Jitsi Meet, but it's more about video calls than about the audio-only.

  • The Discord client is actually pretty good, and is superior to Teams in basically doing one thing well. Microsoft Teams has the most insane federation system, that is effectively effortless in Discord.

    I hope they do buy Discord - it will end up enhancing Teams and at the same time rid Discord of the pimply teenagers and degenerates it has been overrrun by.

  • Great, so they can ruin yet another great tool...

    Skype prior to MS purchasing them - great tool... Post acquisition - utter POS!

  • And fuck it completely and utterly.

  • I still prefer old school IRC.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      Irc work well when you need/want text chat, but ut kind of falls down when you need/ want voice, and as discord is used a lot for in game communication texr chat might not allways be a good solusion. You might combine irc an another protocol for voice, but it seams no dev wants to do thst, I don’t know why, hard to monazite maybe

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by antdude ( 79039 )

        Yeah, I don't use voice, video, etc. due to my impediments.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
          Fair enugh I did not say voice was used by evryone, but for a lot of oeople that is a feature duscord has that irc did not
  • You know what microsoft won't buy... IRC!

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