Microsoft is gigantic, they loose absolutely nothing by competing against themselves.
People get caught up in the on-size-fits-all mentality. If you are a 20 man start-up it’s stupid to make 3 separate solutions that all compete. When you employ north of a hundred thousand people, it’s less of an issue.
From a certain size onwards not competing against yourself seems to be almost irresponsible. Just imagine the fate Intel without any internal competition to the Itanium, or without the Haifa team that insisted on pitting a refined P6 against netburst for mobile.
Totally agree with this. I've heard Amazon does similar things, like multiple teams competing with each other to accomplish similar goals. Can be very healthy for the company if managed correctly.
That particular example, I'm not even sure if it's an issue of teams competing for the king of the messaging hill. And it's of particular interest to me as a developer who works in the messaging space.
It's not hard to get right, it's not difficult to get wrong either-everyone has their spin on messaging and that kind of choice is perfectly fine. We don't need one to rule them all, at least IMO.
But goodness gracious Google just seems to have NO clue what they're doing with messaging. Which is frustrating because in the sliver of time they got it right, they got it right (that time when Hangouts was actually kind of great, it was well integrated, and looked like Google was actually trying to make it better? Member those days?) and then-as expected-they stripped the car for parts and we ended up with two communications (Duo and Allo) platforms that really should have been one feature-rich solution.
Microsoft also has Flow, which can kind of do a lot of the same things as well, although more on the if-this-then-that type of model. It's actually pretty handy, since that seems to be the best way to do workflows that create issues into VSTS/AzureDevOps, or generate notifications out of it.
Logic Apps and Flow have the same tech and platform (shared code base). One requires an Azure subscription, the other doesn't so is aimed at Office/IT rather than devs and platform people
People get caught up in the on-size-fits-all mentality. If you are a 20 man start-up it’s stupid to make 3 separate solutions that all compete. When you employ north of a hundred thousand people, it’s less of an issue.