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Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

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Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#701

Post by jope12 »

ddingus wrote: post #318

While I'm happy for the people who made a lot of money in this transaction, I always read these announcements with a bit of angst. From a user point of view, I expect this to go like Reddit has, for example. Everyone building that value saw high use value, returns on their investment in the form of information they need, lean, easy to find, high signal to noise. Now there is a debt to be paid. The new owner needs to…

The whole point of creating Stack Overflow was to not have subscription access like Experts Exchange. Doing that would be suicide for SO.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#702

Post by mceachen »

nine_k wrote: post #695
xenadu02 wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While somewhat rare there are holding companies like Jonas Software that buy lots of smaller software companies in various markets then effectively let each subsidiary run without too much interference. Their philosophy seems to be own most or all of the competitors in a vertical market, sell the software for a reasonable (read: non-Oracle) price with ongoing maintenance, and collect the cash. I only know about them…

Berkshire Hathaway has an exactly the same approach: an acquired company keeps operating in the way which made it successful. I won't say this approach turned out bad for Berkshire or Mr. Buffett personally.

This approach requires

1. a _huge_ amount of trust and respect for the acquired team to not meddle/interfere, and

2. a huge amount of restraint to not force the acquired team into conforming to whatever standards and norms are present in the acquiring team.

Both of these are exceedingly rare.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#703

Post by Rapzid »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #614
dave_sid wrote: post #308

I hope Jon Skeet gets something out of it.

One article said they were making 61 new millionaires so if he's a significant SO stock holder he's doing quite well.

That's great. Man, always felt for those SO employees high on "market rate" spiel.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#704

Post by Rapzid »

pookeh wrote: post #134

I for one would have fully loved to have Stack Overflow be bought by Github/Microsoft, and just replace Github discussions. Of course there are topics that fall outside of the scope of repos but ... fully contextualized communities belonging to repos all in one place would have been very powerful.

SO is explicitly NOT for discussion. It's Q&A.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#705

Post by edgyquant »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #331
ddingus wrote: post #318

While I'm happy for the people who made a lot of money in this transaction, I always read these announcements with a bit of angst. From a user point of view, I expect this to go like Reddit has, for example. Everyone building that value saw high use value, returns on their investment in the form of information they need, lean, easy to find, high signal to noise. Now there is a debt to be paid. The new owner needs to…

I dunno. Reddit seems like an example of a successful acquisition. Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it. But I agree with you overall. I'm a bit nervous too. Stack Overflow is so good, and its fate is now entirely in the hands of the purchaser. EDIT: In the other announcement post ( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announ... ): Today we’re pleased to announce that Stack Overfl…

>Reddit seems like an example of a successful acquisition

For whom? For people who uses it since the beginning it isn’t even the same place anymore. It’s UX (and I’m not talking about the aesthetics of the new design, I don’t mind those) is legitimately the worst I’ve ever experienced and the quality of discussion has went down the drain. Even if you find a tightly controlled community dedicated to a topic you’re interested in it’s either one extreme to another or doesn’t last long.

That doesn’t even get into the constant rolling out for Facebook-tier features that no Reddit user ever wanted. I stopped using Reddit last month after ~12 years and I’ve since realized I was getting nothing but regurgitated memes and anger from a dozen people replying to my every comment who aren’t even addressing what I was saying just arguing for arguments sake.

It’s basically what Facebook groups were in 2016 at this point. I’m sure it’s a great acquisition for those who bought it, but for the old power users it’s anything but.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#706

Post by human »

skohan wrote: post #523
dested wrote: post #11

I always thought Microsoft would be a natural buyer given the tech stack and Microsoft's support for developers. Unrelated story, I have a day one Stack Overflow account. I don't remember how I found it but I'm sure it was posted on digg or slashdot or something at the time. I had a lot of posts in the first few years about some generally broad concepts, and completely inactive since. In spite of this, I am in the to…

I'm actually glad MS would not also own SO. Github has been basically fine under MS ownership so far, but it seems like we're headed into a period of massive corporate consolidation, and I'd be happy if not all the developer tools are controlled by one interested party

I totally agree with you. Legislators should watch out for too much power consolidation here.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#707

Post by [deleted] »

skunkworker wrote: post #337
sillysaurusx wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. Reddit seems like an example of a successful acquisition. Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it. But I agree with you overall. I'm a bit nervous too. Stack Overflow is so good, and its fate is now entirely in the hands of the purchaser. EDIT: In the other announcement post ( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announ... ): Today we’re pleased to announce that Stack Overfl…

Conde Nast also owns Ars Technica, which personally is my favorite tech-news site and has high and consistent quality.

[deleted]

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#708

Post by [deleted] »

linsomniac wrote: post #147

I ended up losing access to my ancient account (it was using the OpenID providers that they don't even support anymore and the provider I used isn't around). I had gone fairly inactive, but recently wanted to contribute some content. This was on the DIY stackoverflow, there's a fairly common problem on my stove, but an easy, low/no cost fix, it's just very involved. The DIY SO had a good discussion of the problem. To…

[deleted]

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#709

Post by Kye »

sneilan1 wrote: post #593

What about all the people who contributed over the years to Stack Overflow? All the people that took time out of their day for years to answer people's questions and keep the site organized. Stack Overflow would be worthless without its contributors. It seems like Stack Overflow is a company that has figured out a way to profit of the Hacker Ethos of helping people. I guess if you concentrate enough naive volunteers…

If tech can't stomach unions, it'll never take to co-ops.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#710

Post by travisjungroth »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #585
gm3dmo wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TomTom and BlackBerry had great brands, marketing and great software stacks. I still correct the google maps voice when it tells me to take the third exit on the roundabout. It’s “roundabound”. The people who ran those companies didn’t see anybody stealing their businesses either. Yet they are well and truly gone. https://youtu.be/ATulnxruvhQ

> I still correct the google maps voice when it tells me to take the third exit on the roundabout. It’s “roundabound”. If it's saying "roundabout," I hope you're not correcting it to "roundabound," because "roundabout" is the correct word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundabout

Yeah what? Maybe it’s some local dialect.
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