Why Microsoft bought Skype

Post by rkudeshi » Sun, May 15, 2011, 8:34 PM UTC

patrickk wrote: post #84

netcan wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. SAP is an order of magnitude bigger than Skype but the point about getting into this space if they're serious about getting into a different space is a good one. Netsuite, intuit & salesforce are trading @ $2.3b, $16.75b & $17.9b. They could conceivably buy all three with just this 'overseas cash' they supposedly need to spend and still have change. Thinking about MS's available cash in terms of companies…

According to this article, Microsoft are sitting on a $50bn (!) pile of cash, $42bn of which is located ouside the US: http://blogs.forbes.com/ericsavitz/2011/05/10/microsoft-with... They could do nearly six Skype-sized deals, just using cash (without issuing bonds or using stock!) Incredible. They could probably buy SAP, but their cash pile would be gone, plus they would have to give up a significant amount of stock…

Post by jodrellblank » Mon, May 16, 2011, 1:56 AM UTC

macrael wrote: post #29

jodrellblank wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be the default understanding that what someone says and writes is their opinion. Not having that as the default is how we ended up with the terrible popular style "in my opinion it could be argued that for some people it is mostly better if they XYZ, where possible (consult your doctor)". NB, when I say it's a terrible style, that's my opinion, not a universal truth or peer reviewed fact cited in a publishe…

I'm not so sure. I agree that weasel words can destroy a piece of writing, but a complete lack of them can come off badly too. The main effect of killing the qualifiers in your writing is increasing the confidence in the tone of the piece. Obviously, we all have different levels of confidence in our many different opinions, and if you stop using qualifiers all together, you lose the ability to distinguish between dif…

Post by joe_the_user » Wed, May 18, 2011, 8:12 AM UTC

netcan wrote: post #80

joe_the_user wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft basically invented the hardware-agnostic software platform I'm trying hard to understand what you're talking about and its not working. Windows has run on the "PC clone" for almost its entire existence. IBM pioneered the original PC as a fairly easily clone-able platform, meaning it wasn't hard to reverse engineer the bios. It was one hardware platform, one hardware standard, that multiple manufacturers cou…

I think you're too focused on looking at it from a technical perspective. I think what erikpukinskis is referring to is "hardware-agnostic software platform" as a business model/industry environment. Maybe IBM did invent that, but it was accidental. I'm not sure they did though, I think MS did.