Goodbye "Skype®", hello "Microsoft Windows Live Connect for Windows Live®"
Microsoft to buy Skype for $7 billion
31–40 of 277 posts
Re: Microsoft to buy Skype for $7 billion
#32Microsoft owns the desktop - that's their cash cow. For large businesses they (basically) have to buy outlook / exchange. They throw powerpoint, visio, word, excel on top of that, plus the operating system, and they own it. From an operating system standpoint, there's not any real threat. From a productivity suites perspective, there's a bit more threat from cloud, but it's still comparatively small. Same can be said for email - gmail is a much larger threat but for corporate security, calendaring, integration, it's still not really there. This will probably be different in 5 years as the proprietary protocols and integrations move towards open standards. I find it ridiculous that I can't find another desktop email client that will natively work with exchange/MAPI, and Microsoft knows it. Skype is just extending it to the desktop, and it's a strong part of the desktop suite. I think they want to play in the enterprise space, because nobody wants to use Lync for anything other than IM (aforementioned turd comment here).
Re: Microsoft to buy Skype for $7 billion
#33Skype is losing tons of money and needed to get out with whatever users it had. Microsoft can then sync this up with their own communication clients for a joint play.
You can bet Skype will relaunch in 2012 as Windows SomethingLame (with Skype) and finally just Windows SomethingLame.
Re: Microsoft to buy Skype for $7 billion
#34Weren't we talking about Google or Facebook buying Skype a few days ago at $1-3 billion? What the heck happened? Insecurities?
Faced with 3 awful choices they chose the one with most money.
Re: Microsoft to buy Skype for $7 billion
#35If this goes through, I wonder what would happen to Skype's Linux and Mac support. I'd hope MS would still support it, but I don't think they have any Linux software currently (I'm not positive about that, so please correct me if I'm wrong) and the Mac version of Office is always delayed compared to the Windows version. I hope Skype doesn't similarly languish.
Skype very nearly doesn't have Linux software either. The mac software is similarly less than focused on as well.
Re: Microsoft to buy Skype for $7 billion
#36A few thoughts: When we see the mac version stagnate, we won't be able to say MS has sabotaged it - skype did that before on their own. The linux version has never been on parity with the others - will it be officially killed? Might MS actually put resources in to it to make it work as well as the others? Overall, good on MS for doing this. I'm assuming this may bring on some more interesting dynamics to the google v…
Don't forget about the Android and iOS apps. No doubt those will be killed off as well.
Not so fast. Have you seen the Bing and Microsoft research apps? Bing also is being used on Chinese versions of the Dell Android phones instead of Google.
Re: Microsoft to buy Skype for $7 billion
#37Weren't we talking about Google or Facebook buying Skype a few days ago at $1-3 billion? What the heck happened? Insecurities?
Faced with 3 awful choices they chose the one with most money.
I don't disagree with you as to what happened, but I'm genuinely curious as to why you think that Microsoft, Google and Facebook are all awful choices.
Re: Microsoft to buy Skype for $7 billion
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
The value of the dollar's dropped. Not by that much, but it's certainly changed. That, and ebay never figured out how to monetize it. MS likely has some plans in place to aggressively make money from it. I'm a skype subscriber, and probably will continue to be one, assuming they keep at least the same level of support for Macs.
> The value of the dollar's dropped. Since the owners are almost all US-based (I think), fluctuation in the dollar against foreign markets shouldn't have much impact on Skype's pricing. Even so, the dollar's value against the Euro hasn't hardly changed at all: eBay announced their sale of Skype on September 1, when 1 USD = 0.7 EUR. Today. 1 USD = 0.6975 EUR.
> a group of technology investors including Silver Lake Partners, venture capital firms Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board
Re: Microsoft to buy Skype for $7 billion
#39A few thoughts: When we see the mac version stagnate, we won't be able to say MS has sabotaged it - skype did that before on their own. The linux version has never been on parity with the others - will it be officially killed? Might MS actually put resources in to it to make it work as well as the others? Overall, good on MS for doing this. I'm assuming this may bring on some more interesting dynamics to the google v…
Don't forget about the Android and iOS apps. No doubt those will be killed off as well.
Interestingly, if Microsoft does buy Skype and make it Windows only, they would be opening a huge door for GChat as [EDIT: the obvious] cross-platform client. FaceTime too, I guess, if Apple decides to move in that direction.
If Skype isn't the default, verbed, system, doesn't it lose some value?
Re: Microsoft to buy Skype for $7 billion
#40A few thoughts: When we see the mac version stagnate, we won't be able to say MS has sabotaged it - skype did that before on their own. The linux version has never been on parity with the others - will it be officially killed? Might MS actually put resources in to it to make it work as well as the others? Overall, good on MS for doing this. I'm assuming this may bring on some more interesting dynamics to the google v…
Don't forget about the Android and iOS apps. No doubt those will be killed off as well.
I hope not. The Skype client on iOS is really handy.