I think Microsoft will leverage its relationship with facebook and use skype as their alternative to apple's facetime. Though I am worried about the future of Skype's linux client.
Why Microsoft bought Skype
31–40 of 95 posts
Re: Why Microsoft bought Skype
#32[deleted]
Re: Why Microsoft bought Skype
#33> Apple is not the next anything because the role it aspires to transcends anything imaginable by Microsoft, ever. Really? Both are publicly traded companies whose role is to make money for shareholders. I don't see how it's possible to transcend this.
Yes, I can't imagine how anyone would expect people to take them seriously when they write blatant fanboy crap like this, while commenting about Apple's competition.
Re: Why Microsoft bought Skype
#34Tldr: Cringely believes Google is the next Microsoft. Microsoft is worried about its future and bought Skype so Google wouldn't buy Skype. Cringely believes Apple, however, is a magical unicorn that Ballmer cannot even comprehend.
Re: Why Microsoft bought Skype
#35According to Cringely "Apple has no peer". I guess that depends on how you look at it. Apple's execution is unparalleled, but the broadness and disruptive nature of Google's strategy is hard to deny. The new Android Open Accessory Development Kit strategy, for example, is something I'd never expect to come from Cupertino or Redmond.
Re: Why Microsoft bought Skype
#36I don't believe that at all. Google doesn't need Skype. Microsoft bought Skype because they have large amounts of cash in Europe that they cannot repatriate without taking a huge tax hit. For some strange reason, Ballmer has that obsession with hyperactively pursuing the same consumers that Google and Apple have. That's why he didn't see anything else to buy in Europe (Actually there isn't a whole lot). But there is…
I agree with this wholeheartedly -- Microsoft's fatal error was assuming they would continue to be the dominant force in both consumer and enterprise computing. They still own the enterprise. Why they aren't happy with this and focus on taking steps to ensure their dominance there for the next decade is beyond me.
They're still the ones who make the most used OS in the world. They're not the ones innovating and creating new markets and paradigms. But were they, ever ?
Re: Why Microsoft bought Skype
#37Am I the only one who has had terrible experience with Skype? I live in New York but my family is from Australia so I use video-calling them to them all the time. I've tried using Skype but basically it's terrible. Poor audio, choppy frame rates and at some point it will start giving messages about "degraded performance" and we'll lose video. My setup is a 50Mbps cable line using wireless (N) from a Macbook Pro. The…
I lived in China and regularly had to contact people in Europe. I tried a lot of things, but in the end, Skype was the best overall experience, far better than Google Voice, especially in video. I had a fairly low bandwidth (3 MBps), but quality was fine.
Re: Why Microsoft bought Skype
#38And the $8.5 billion price? That was effectively set by Google, not Microsoft. Ballmer would have paid anything for Skype. $8.5 billion is just the price at which Google feels it is better for them to build rather than buy.
That's not really 8.5 bil for Skype. The cost to develop that would be a lot less. That's actually 8.5 bil for 140 million active users. That's about $60 a head. Not a bad deal for a big company in the telecom/mobile hardware space.
Re: Why Microsoft bought Skype
#39Microsoft is weak on social network, and Skype could be a first step to fixing that. Skype offers a great foundation for social because the contacts it contains are often better ones than Facebook offers. By adding to components to what already has an entrenched base, Microsoft can leap forward without trying to "break into" the established market.
>the contacts it contains are often better ones than Facebook offers.
Really? That's not my experience. The contacts I have on Skype are the people I call from my computer, not all my friends.
For instance, I don't call my coworkers from Skype, because all their numbers are on my cell phone. I don't call my close friends, because al their numbers are on my cell phone.
In fact, the only contacts I have on Skype are the out-of-town people I video call (my parents, my sister, my niece) and the places I order food for delivery.
Re: Why Microsoft bought Skype
#40I don't believe that at all. Google doesn't need Skype. Microsoft bought Skype because they have large amounts of cash in Europe that they cannot repatriate without taking a huge tax hit. For some strange reason, Ballmer has that obsession with hyperactively pursuing the same consumers that Google and Apple have. That's why he didn't see anything else to buy in Europe (Actually there isn't a whole lot). But there is…
I agree with you. MS and SAP would be a pretty formidable force. Having said that, MS continue to make very good strides in the business market but they still need to play in the consumer market.
You guys do realize that SAP is at least one order of magnitude larger than Skype, right? It rings in at a $77 BILLION in market cap on the NYSE[1]. I'm not even sure that represents SAP's total value, either. There seems to be a separate listing valued at $55 BILLION that's traded on ETR[2]. SAP AG was the fourth largest software company in the entire world by revenue in 2010[3].
That kind of merger would be unique in Microsoft's history[4]. In fact Skype is already Microsoft's largest merger in history by a sizable margin.
EDIT: The ETR listing is valued in euros, where 55 billion EUR roughly translates to 77 billion USD. Although I still don't know if that fully accounts for SAP AG's value.
[1] http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ASAP [2] http://www.google.com/finance?q=ETR:SAP [3] http://www.softwaretop100.org/global-software-top-100-editio... [4] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_merge...