Hacker News Reader

Ah that's a good explanation of Blue Prism vs UI Path.

I think MS is planning to offer it in the O365 stack which means if its half decent it will probably eat UI Path's lunch?

> I don't think legacy support is a major point for them, which will probably be good enough for most people.

Interesting that you say that, I thought that would be one of the primary usecases of RPA? Legacy apps where there's no possibility of an API.

View on HN

Legacy app support takes a huge amount of work. And probably doesn't have the profit margins MS likes to see, and/or enough of a market to impact their bottom line.

My guess would be they'll develop really tight integration with the Office suite, wrap a thin shim around Active Accessibility [0] / UI Automation (/ whatever they want to call it), and call it a day.

Also, there's a ton of Java stuff out there that gets very esoteric. And that doesn't seem like something MS is interested in expanding into.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Active_Accessibili...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com