Microsoft's Holy Trinity: The '-Craft' Collection is Finally Complete
Description
This is a two-panel meme using the 'Finally, I Have Them All' format from the animated series 'Gravity Falls.' In the top panel, three ancient, mysterious journals labeled '1', '2', and '3' are lying on a surface. Each journal has been edited to bear the name of a legendary video game franchise: 'MINECRAFT', 'WARCRAFT', and 'STARCRAFT'. The subtitle 'After all these years.' is visible. The bottom panel shows the character Grunkle Stan, who has been labeled 'MICROSOFT', looking triumphant and declaring, 'Finally, I have them all.' The meme humorously chronicles Microsoft's long-term acquisition strategy in the gaming world. It references three of the most influential 'craft'-titled game IPs. Microsoft acquired 'Minecraft' by purchasing Mojang in 2014, and later acquired 'Warcraft' and 'Starcraft' through its blockbuster acquisition of Activision Blizzard, announced in early 2022. For the tech-savvy audience, the meme perfectly captures the culmination of a multi-billion dollar, decade-long strategy to dominate the gaming market, framing it as a simple, satisfying moment of completing a coveted collection
Comments
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Microsoft's next investor call will just be Satya Nadella holding up the three game boxes and whispering 'Exodia'. Now begins the epic task of migrating all three to a single .NET backend running on Azure
Microsoft’s M&A filter must just be `/.*craft$/` - I’m tempted to rebrand our 3 MMLOC monolith as “EnterpriseBillingCraft” and wait for the buy-out
Microsoft's acquisition strategy is just dependency injection at enterprise scale - except instead of interfaces, they're injecting $70 billion and hoping the integration tests pass in production
Microsoft's portfolio strategy is just a dedupe job: GROUP BY suffix '-craft', then acquire until COUNT(*) = ALL
Microsoft's M&A strategy: if it ends in 'craft', it's getting acquired. They've gone from 'embrace, extend, extinguish' to 'acquire, consolidate, craft' - though at $69B for Activision Blizzard, they're paying premium prices to complete their Infinity Gauntlet of gaming franchises. Next up: acquiring Valve to get Dota (the Warcraft 3 mod that got away) and finally achieving full vertical integration of the RTS-to-MOBA pipeline
Microsoft nabbed Minecraft, Warcraft, and StarCraft - congrats, they now own ICraft; standby for the rename to Azure.Craft.*, mandatory Entra login, and a breaking change across every mod API
Microsoft's acquisition spree: hoarding game IPs like a senior dev clings to that one legacy monolith 'just in case'
Microsoft solved dependency hell by pinning Mojang@2014 and Activision-Blizzard@2023; the Game Pass lockfile finally resolves craft@* while antitrust stays an optional devDependency