[ska]

I'm not convinced this is MSFT specific, and I do appreciate your optimism about the team (your team?) and what it is doing.

Taken as a whole, these sort of acquisitions/acquihires have not tended to go well for the users of the smaller teams original products. One can argue that their is or is not a net win, of course - but if you are a user of a service like this and really like it, chances are pretty good you aren't going to like what company X does with it after acquisition. Given that, it's pretty unremarkable to hear people say "so much for service X, now A has bought them". On the whole, they are mostly right. Sometimes you get an nice service Y out of it though! Often not a great replacement for the original, but nice nonetheless.