Stack Overflow was built because the forums and mailing lists were inadequate and no one else was addressing the need for something more. Historically speaking, SO is the third iteration of a commons for knowledge share. It had a great run. However, the time is coming for a new wave. Among the next wave will be Microsoft, who is well positioned with its portfolio of products and companies. I predict that Microsoft will introduce a collaboration and knowledge management platform that will compete with Stack Overflow. GitHub will play a significant role as will Microsoft AI products.
Agreed. There is certainly an overlap between SO jobs and Linkedin, and then also the SO teams product and existing MS knowledge bases. Not to mention MS already has "Microsoft Teams", so that might be confusing.
You mean like the over lap between what is now Azure Devops and Github? They both offer free git hosting but former offers private free repos, hosted builds, and deployments.
I'm not sure that the technology running in the backend is really relevant here. If anything having "objective" third parties using your technology seems like a better selling argument for .Net than having it in-house.
Looking at Microsoft's strategy I doubt they would care whether it runs on .Net or something else. They would look into integrating with Azure (lots of Linux) and GitHub (R-o-R) as well as SO Jobs with LinkedIn (Java(?))
Well, that customer is paying those licenses from their own income. By acquiring $customer you can get all of their revenue and not just the part they currently spend on licenses.
True and I wasn't fully serious. But: Having SO as an external showcase has benefits for attracting other customers over "we use it on our site" A testimony from an internal customer is less valuable as I see more company politics over technical reasoning.
It depends how you measure. But my company runs .NET at a much bigger scale (in terms of http requests and infrastructure footprint) than SO and I doubt that we are the only ones.
or maybe someone would create an SO alternative as a distributed service where you share and sync Q&A of all the topics relevant to you. Imagine all the answers you looking for are available offline!
SO will still be there but maybe it will start the journey of it's eventual slow death.
SO is a social media site. So I think it makes more sense for a company like LinkedIn, Facebook or Condé Nast.
LinkedIn is making bank with its subscription tiers. So they’d do a good job, financially speaking, of doing the same thing with SO. Large companies and recruitment services will be able to buy premium subscriptions to see who is doing what on the platform. Professionals will pay $50/month to have better access and limit access to non-paying members.
EDIT: Oops. Now I know that Microsoft owns LinkedIn.
