from Hacker News

The case for consolidation

by bothra90 on 5/14/22, 10:37 PM with 11 comments

• by bob1029 on 5/15/22, 4:17 PM

  > They don’t actually mind proprietary languages. They want products that work, and products that work together. Modularity and flexibility are useful to the extent that they’re means to those ends.

  This is why we are a pure Microsoft shop today. Between Visual Studio, GitHub and .NET/C#, we have been able to construct a stable, long-term B2B product stack with a very small team. If we had selected a more diverse tech stack, it is almost certain that we would have failed. I know this because we tried microservices, simply on top of a pure Microsoft stack, and it almost killed us. I cannot imagine the depths of hell we would be in if we had tried to mix & match different tech on top of that horrible idea.

  Are we taking some risk that we are missing out on some amazing new tech that Microsoft would frown upon? Absolutely. But, we know what works for us, the roadmaps are clear, and our customers are happy (they love that we only have ~1 vendor). The things that Microsoft does not like, we just invent in-house. Fortunately, there isn't a lot of stuff we disagree on these days.

• by api on 5/15/22, 4:33 PM

  As usual it boils down to: open and modular is better except that people won’t pay for it, so we get closed monoliths and SaaS even if they are often inferior.

  It really does seem that you have to make businesses pay. Otherwise they won’t, and if they don’t there will be no resources to actually build what people want.

  But as I always say: people will spend $300 in a month at Starbucks. No problem. But paying a quarter or less of that for software is a hard no. So we get what we pay for, or rather don’t get what we won’t pay for.

• by civilized on 5/15/22, 4:37 PM

  Contrarianism can be fun, but I draw the line at the idea that users don't care about product quality and therefore Slack is being bulldozed by Teams. Teams users are going up (nevermind this metric is probably heavily juiced and meaningless) but that hasn't caused Slack adoption to go down. There will always be a hard core of Slack users who will never use Teams because it would ruin their async collaboration culture.

• by kgwgk on 5/15/22, 6:58 PM

  > Yammer was collecting revenues in the low eight figures and burning through a bonfire of cash every quarter. Microsoft, by contract, practically ran a printing press in their basement.

  Funny typo (if it was indeed supposed to read “by contrast”).