Microsoft to Acquire Skype for $8.5 Billion

[Speedy2]

Most of you critics would be praising this deal if it was Apple making the acquisition.

People are mainly wondering about the massive price, not about the actual buyer. This would still happen if any other company had just shelled out $8.5B to buy something that will never make that amount of money and doesn't add a strategic value.

 

[bluedog3401]

Be interesting to see what they do with it. You would think MS are able to develop all this stuff themselves so they must be mainly buying the brand and the existing customers. In which case it is a lot to pay. Could work well if integrated with XBox Live etc though.

[sarcasm?]
I can see them integrating it with visual basic scripting and active-x'ing it. That way, they can more easily leverage all their developers into using it in their applications.

Its going to be so easy to add voice and video communications to your MicroSkype applications. A developer's applications will simply go viral and we will be using it! How much easiery to get your programs onto everyone's computer.
[/sarcasm?]

 

[Jcoz]

Problem is: WLM is dying. People are using Facebook Chat now. Skype/Microsoft can just pray to the ancient transistor God that Facebook won't come out with a video chat or else Skype will lose active users faster than Myspace.

Ding. Ding.

 

[MH01]

He wasn't talking about software that Microsoft makes, he was talking about Microsoft's history of acquisitions. That has nothing to do with Windows.

Okay, what are the recent acquisitions that microsoft has screwed up? Sorry buy Apple's recent record say with Lala is not exactly anything I am proud of ...

 

[fredoviola]

the horror... the horror...

 

[ten-oak-druid]

That's a shame. Skype was a good piece of software.

 

[Speedy2]

Pfft. 8.5 billion, thats like $8.50 for Microsoft. IMHO Apple should have bought Skype and done something brilliant with it... But if anyone can make that company a cashcow it's Microsoft.

Microsoft hasn't made anything a cash cow for a decade now! Too early for sure to call Kinect one.

 

[ciTiger]

MSFT trying to get back in the game... Odds are against them though... They don't have a good track record of making good out of what they buy...

 

[pjarvi]

This is great news for anyone with an Xbox360 and Live subscription. I'm looking forward to being able to call my parents from the living room. Smart move by Microsoft, now let's just hope they don't screw it up.

 

[Jcoz]

So days ago I read that Skype COULD be worth as much as 4 billion and today I read MS paid 8.5 billion for it?

Good day for the private stock owners of Skype.

 

[batchtaster]

This sucks. Guess I'll be removing Skype from my devices. I really liked those guys too.

Dark Lord Ballmer strikes again.

Skype as a company and an app is not that good. Just look at the recent security hole. a) that it happened, and b) that they didn't tell anyone about the fix. That's not professional.

Microsoft's not on even my Top 10 favorite companies, but they could learn a few things from Redmond. If you want to cut off your nose to spite your face, just cos it has a Microsoft badge on it, that's your business.

 

[ten-oak-druid]

Maybe Apple will build a skype like service into iOS.

 

[xlii]

The news on the radio just said that Ebay still owns 25% of skype.

 

[chaosbunny]

Because Apple doesn't have Microsoft's history of non-innovation and ruining the value of their acquisitions.

Cough: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shake_(software)

 

[0098386]

Well I've got faith. I use a lot of their software (Live Messenger, Live Writer, Windows XP) and they're great. Hopefully they don't change Skype around too much - it's quite good as it is.

 

[NAG]

Most of you critics would be praising this deal if it was Apple making the acquisition.

Wow, nice conversation starter. You completely ignore how people are saying Microsoft is paying waaay too much when they already have a product that basically does this. It would be like Apple buying Dell. Microsoft is paying a huge sum to for the Skype customers. When you're buying a company for their installed base it doesn't really speak very well of what you think of their product. This is classic embrace, extend, extinguish except for the fact that Microsoft lobotomized themselves ever since the DOJ wrist slapped them, causing them to get the order mixed up.

 

[cube]

I never bought a VoIP phone because what I really wanted was a Skype+SIP phone, even if I never liked the idea of supporting a proprietary protocol.

This settles it now. I'll be buying a SIP Gigaset.

 

[German]

Maybe Apple will build a skype like service into iOS.

Apple should use more XMPP (Jabber).




Jitsi - Open Source Video Calls and Chat (XMPP, SIP)
Security
Encrypted password storage
Password protection with a master password
Encrypted Instant Messaging with Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR)
Call encryption with SRTP and ZRTP

http://www.jitsi.org/

 

[the vj]

Steve Balmer is the Hugo Chavez of silicon valley...

... all what he touched becomes crap.

 

[Speedy2]

Lastly -- and possibly most importantly -- Microsoft has done something really well over the last decade (arguably better than anyone): console gaming.

That prize goes to Nintendo for the Wii. Sorry.
Xbox isn't making any serious money and has just broken even like 1 or 2 years ago. We'll see what happens with Kinect. Don't forget that outside the US the Xbox isn't dominant at all.

 

[NebulaClash]

Okay, what are the recent acquisitions that microsoft has screwed up?

Danger, which went right into the ground as Kin.

 

[Full of Win]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5)

Why do that? Why not judge the app/service on it merits rather than who owns it?

 

[NebulaClash]

Cough: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shake_(software)

Seriously? You are going to suggest there is any company on Earth that rivals Microsoft for screwing up acquisitions?

 

[pizzach]

As long as they continue to update the Mac/iPhone version and provide an iPad optimized app I'm alright with this.

I'll give them a chance and see what they do before I hold any judgement

I salute you sir. Just like everybody giving MS the benefit of the doubt with Virtual PC. Then VPC promptly stopped getting real updates on the Mac. I'm sure the Windows 7 Mobile version of Skype will be great.

 

[Žalgiris]

Skype has been a fantastic multi-platform video conferencing application.

Hopefully microsoft will improve Skype, instead of degrading user experience. They claim they'll keep investing in the current supported platforms. We'll see.

Could have been worse, Oracle could have bought Skype. Microsoft's first priority should be to fix the crap GUI that Skype 5 has.

Microsoft, fix and UI in the same sentence? That's like lightning striking 3 times in the same place.