[I work @ Microsoft, am totally uninvolved in all of this, all comments are my own and personal speculation. mostly copy-pasta from my Ars Technica comment]

My takes on this in no particular order:

  1. Microsoft effectively has no consumer chat offerings, and this would fill a big gap/niche. Teams for consumers is overkill and I believe (based on personal anecdotes) that it’s not very popular. Skype is dead in all but name (sorry folks, but c’mon), and so this could be really valuable. It’s a well-built and well-loved service with inroads in the gaming, artistic/creative, etc spaces.

    1b. I don’t think the near-term future of this acquisition would change that trajectory, as I think heavy Microsoft account integration and so on would be relatively slow to materialize and (hopefully) done more deliberately and carefully.

  2. While it’s easy to look at the botched Skype acquisition and see dire portents I think it’s more instructive to look at Microsoft’s mega-acquisitions under new leadership (‘The Nadella Effect,’ if you like). I believe the substantially more hands-off approach taken with LinkedIn, GitHub, etc would likely be repeated with a Discord acquisition. This, in my reading, means that an acquisition might increase tie-ins with Microsoft services (hello Xbox) but it would not simultaneously come with handicapping of non-Microsoft integrations. That particular hegemony strategy isn’t currently in favor at the company so I wouldn’t expect to see it repeated. The consensus seems to be that both LinkedIn+GitHub acquisitions are going well, so why change what has worked in the past?

  3. I’m a Discord Nitro subscriber basically because I get $100/yr of value from Discord. That said, I would imagine that subscription fee could be sort of consumed through other offerings (GamePass + xCloud is a natural fit here in the electronic gaming space).

    If you, like me, value the ad-free nature of Discord then a purchase of Discord, and particularly a purchase by a non-advertising company, should be seen as really good news. A different purchaser (Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc) with stronger capability in the consumer ad space would see things very differently here.

  4. This is not the same as Google’s struggles with chat offerings either as the long lineage of Microsoft’s eventual failures in this space are both less numerous and spread over a span of time that is basically double Google’s. I also think Google’s struggles are substantially more self-inflicted (like killing products people actively enjoy in favor of some new unproven system, vs. slowly letting the products rot) but Microsoft’s struggles in the consumer chat/comms space are farcical for other reasons. 😅