Careful, you may cut yourself on all that edge.

At least the software will be ready on time.

Yes x1000!!!

How much? I know it's undisclosed but it would be very interesting. Hopefully someone leaks it.

The rumor was Miguel told MS to "F*#K Off" when MS presented him with an offer many years ago. This lead to CoreCLR being open sourced and Visual Studio Code being built.

I'd like to know if by undermining parts of Xamarins business they were able to get them at substantial discount - especially with the tech industry downturn. Or if failure in the Windows Phone market has made MS desperate and forced their hand. Given it's undisclosed I'm guessing it's the former. I'd like to know if telling MS to "F#&K Off" was a good strategy :)

Open sourcing the compiler, CoreCLR, and JIT made Xamarin's life easier, not harder.

Acquiring Xamarin is just acknowledging that Windows Phone is DOA and their best shot at monetizing the mobile world is providing backend hosting/services and developer tools. That's not a secret - that's their publicly announced strategy.

I'd expect all the Xamarin tools to be built-in to VS going forward. One VS/MSDN subscription gets you everything and the tools will make it trivially easy to host on Azure.

Exactly what I was thinking. They are probably going to go with a business model similar to Amazon's Lumberyard

>The rumor was Miguel told MS to "F&#K Off" when MS presented him with an offer many years ago. This lead to CoreCLR being open sourced and Visual Studio Code being built.

The rumor sounds bogus. MS has been collaborating with Xamarin (and it's previous incarnation) for almost a decade.

They can both be true. I think the valuation will be telling.

OK, here's another thing: Miguel has long advocated MS opening up their platform, and has welcomed every such move as it happened.

Companies have a long history of saying one thing privately and another thing publicly. If it were public then it wouldn't be a rumor.

Well, there's the public known facts and then there's a "rumor". I don't know why we're even discussing something as unsubstantiated as the latter.

Besides, even if the price was public, one could read anything it wants it that. "Oh the number is low because MS undermined them".

From what I've seen, the numbers for those companies like Xamarin are always much much lower that BS inflated unicorns with no actual business models...

And there's another thing: for what Xamarin offers (which is in the mobile space, with their support for iOS/Android APIs etc), the open source CLR and the VS Code, the basis for the rumor, don't even figure at all. Nobody that used Xamarin will gonna turn to those products, because they simply don't do the same thing at all.

If both are true then the implication would hold. I think it's "true -> false" which of course doesn't hold.

> This lead to CoreCLR being open sourced and Visual Studio Code being built.

What is it you think those to products are? They aren't trying to reproduce anything Xamarin does.

CoreCLR is part of Microsoft's "cloudy" strategy, they want to be on Linux micro-instances, and on Windows Server Nano. Visual Studio Code is just the absolutely minimum Microsoft has to do to make CoreCLR seem "real" on other platforms (a 101 UI).

Honestly the whole .Net open sourcing/porting thing is a lot older than this cross-platform interest and while the two are aligned right now I highly doubt that's what kicked it off.

Rumor is just south of $300 Million. A nice chunk of change...but Xamarin had the gas and customers to head much higher valuations. Congrats to all involved.

You'd think that most of those customers are most likely to already be MS customers though at a guess.

Having the relevant clients for your acquirer is a classic strategy for this kind of exit.

Thanks

> This lead to CoreCLR being open sourced and Visual Studio Code being built. I'd like to know if by undermining parts of Xamarins business they were able to get them at substantial discount

As a CoreCLR contributor, my impression was always that the mono-team was extremely happy about .NET official going open-source and how that made it possible to align the two code-bases in a much better fashion.

I don't think I've ever seen CoreCLR portrayed as an effort to "undermine" Xamarin or mono. Rather I'd take it as an imitation, the ultimate form of complement.

Where did you get/form that picture?

That doesn't sound like the relationship Miguel and Nat have cultivated with .net or MS, and they could have continued on saying "No." Xamarin didn't NEED MS beyond what it already provides openly, everywhere (.net market support both technically + marketing)

I'd almost be surprised if there were previous formal offers as I'm pretty sure the discussions between Miguel and various MS folks, especially Scott Gu, were frank, open, and mostly trusting. You don't throw out formal offers if you have Xamarin openly talking through why they don't feel the time is right.

My take is Miguel and Nat have always been "do right by the technology first." They danced the line with mono and old MS. They then made a compelling step towards where MS would head a few years prior to MS being able to start showing progress in that direction.

VS Code was created to do something with the Monaco editor developed in typescript for their cloud offering. Same for CoreCLR, the slow and memory hungry runtime of Xamarin wasn't a treat to MS, .Net was approaching irrelevancy without a Linux presence in cloud offerings.

I think it's likely that the tech industry downturn will make the show less funny. Like that oil show.

But if anyone could do it Mike Judge can - that guy is a genius

Anecdotally I see a lot of empty apartments here in SF. Not as bad as London though. I basicslly had an entire massive luxury apartment complex to myself. I would walk around the halls drinking with friends carrying a prop ax pretending we were in the shining. Good times.

It's niche marketing. If they are still interested after a few weeks of messaging they are more likely to settle and less likely to bounce after the next shiny.

I have not read the article yet but that sounds like good advice to me

The article does a great job at helping create a language around the ML/AI field to help laymen reason about it. Shivon did a similar taxonomy based article last year titled The Current State of Machine Intelligence - also a good read.

Unfortunately Bloomberg Beta has the same blinkers on that the rest of the VC industry has. They use Context Relevant as an example but don't disclose their investment. Context Relevant is currently undergoing layoffs after recently kicking out their founder and CEO. I've been watching them for years, their pitch was classic VC bait. Even as an outsider I could tell that their tech stack and corporate culture was not going to work. Their glassdoor reviews makes for interesting reading. I've been using Context Relevant as a bellwether for the rest of the industry as I expect when they can no longer hide their losses there is going to be a whole class of data science / big data / ml VC funded service companies that will go belly up around the same time.

Which has me wondering how Bloomberg Beta will fair after that. I'm sure Mike Bloomberg will have bigger things to worry about at that point in time. People get sick of paying for fancy expensive charts showing them precisely how much money they're losing very quickly.

Anyway - that's enough pessimism from me for one day :)

TL;DR

A good read, but take with the usual prescription of a giant grain of salt