Discord is not for sale. Why is it good news

While free software organizations entertain themselves in sawing the floor to Richard Stallman, Big technology continues to accumulate acquisitions to become monopolies in each of the sectors in which the market was divided.

Some analysts, including the British magazine The Economist, they point out that it issuch concentration does not exist, and that in fact large companies compete with each other and with other smaller ones. But, most likely, at least in my opinion, it is a testimonial competition to keep the regulatory authorities away. Google will stay with searches and web technologies, Amazon with online sales, Microsoft with corporate services and Apple with technology products for mass consumption. In all cases, with some of the others taking a slice of the market that prevents politicians from meddling.

What is Discord

Discord is a platform that allows people integrated in public and private groups to communicate via text, voice or video chat. Born to be used by gamers, it had a great growth during the pandemic and incorporated people with other interests.

The interesting thing is that It seems to have been profitable with a business model based neither on advertising nor on the sale of private user data.

Your payment services; special emojis or higher video resolution, earned him $ 130 million annually. This starts with a monthly payment of $ 4,99 or an annual payment of $ 49,99. With 5 (or 50 dollars more) you get access to better servers. All this in a universe of 140 million users.

Investment search

Nor is it that it needs the urgent support of a large technology company. At the end of last year, Greenoaks Capital and Index Ventures injected him with another $ 100 million. On that occasion the value of the company was established at 7000 billion of the same currency.

Microsoft offered 3000 billion more.

In addition to Nadella's company, Discord had conversations with Amazon and Epic Games. According to the economic news service Bloomberg, the contacts were Discord's idea.

For Microsoft it would have been a good acquisition. Discord could have been integrated as part of the communication functions of Xbox, the company's gaming platform. In fact, the contacts were with Phil Spencer, responsible for that division.

Xbox appears to be the only segment of the home user market in which Microsoft continues to have a chance to lead, as Google's stake Stadia fails to live up to expectations.

Discord is not for sale

The potential purchase didn't go down too well with Discord users. Many recalled the failed marriage of Skype and Windows. Some fear Discord will turn into what they consider "bloated, buggy, and nearly impossible to shutdown software."

These users must have been greatly relieved to find out whate for the moment from Discord they intend to dedicate themselves to improving their platform and finding new ways to make their user base profitable. The way to increase capital, if you want to do so, would be through a public offering of shares.

Still, Microsoft found ways to spend money. paid 7500 billion for gaming company Zenimax and 16000 billion for speech recognition technologies specialist Nuance. With the arrival of Biden and the political changes, his offer for TikTok was no longer attractive to the Chinese video platform.

Why is it good news

I want to make something clear. I am very far from being an enemy of companies. In fact, for some readers of Linux Adictos I am too fond of Microsoft.

I like competing companies, but not monopolies or oligopolies. And, lor what we are experiencing seems to be the result of a Yalta technology conference in which large companies divide up the market in the same way that the powers divided up areas of geographical influence after the war.

So Discord remains independent and can be profitable is good news. We already saw what IBM did with CentOS and Oracle with OpenOffice, Java and OpenSolaris.