Rumours circulating in Silicon Valley suggested that Facebook and Google had been mulling offers in the $3bn to $4bn range, just above the level bankers had told Skype to expect, should it pursue a stock-market flotation instead. It appears to have blown potential rival bidders out of the water. Microsoft made its offer just over a month ago, after working more and more closely with Skype on technological collaborations and partnerships. "Together we will create the future of real-time communications so people can easily stay connected to family, friends, clients and colleagues anywhere in the world," Mr Ballmer said yesterday. Mr Ballmer set out plans, too, to produce new services that bring Skype video conferencing to Xbox Live, the gaming and entertainment services built around Microsoft's gaming console. It hopes to push Skype as a service for businesses, perhaps by integrating it with its Office products, including the Outlook email service. Microsoft isn't just banking on that number growing of its own accord. That was 1.5 million more than the previous year. #Current skype ceo for freeMost people don't pay at all for the service, which connects Skype users for free over the internet as an alternative to having to pay national or international telephone charges.Īt the end of last year, 8.8 million people were paying Skype for additional options, though, including connecting to ordinary landlines or mobile phones. In 2010 as a whole, Skype recorded 207 billion minutes of voice and video conversations. A total of 145 million people signed in to chat in the last three months of 2010, the last for which figures were published, compared with 105 million in the same period the year before. As Mr Ballmer put it yesterday: you don't often get the chance to buy a company whose brand name has become a verb.Īnd Skyping is increasingly popular. The company has been toiling away on its own communications platform, something it calls Microsoft Lync, which synchs up users' instant messaging, video conferencing and phone calls, but in a giant swerve it has snapped up a business with worldwide name recognition. In this context, the Skype deal looks like a desperate roll of the dice, even if it barely makes a dent in Microsoft's cash pile of $50bn. #Current skype ceo androidIt faces losing out in the battle to dominate the smartphone, since Apple and Google's Android dominate the operating-system market, with Windows struggling to make inroads. #Current skype ceo softwareMore importantly, while Microsoft continues to harvest cash from its reliable old bankers – the Windows operating system for PCs and its Office software for businesses – it has thrown billions of dollars at a new generation of businesses on the internet – through its MSN media and email business and its Bing search engine – to decidedly mixed results. Similar promises of integrated Skype and Microsoft services were made yesterday, to the sceptical faces of the analyst community. It was acquired by eBay in 2005, only to be offloaded in 2009 after the company failed to pull off the promised integration of Skype phone and video calls into its famous online marketplace. Microsoft is not the first large company to think it could make decent money out of Skype. It is the largest acquisition in the software giant's 36-year history, and will be by far its biggest gamble.įor multiple reasons, the pressure is on Mr Ballmer to justify the high price he has agreed to pay. The pudding, in this case, is Skype, the internet-telephony pioneer, which Microsoft has swallowed whole in a takeover deal worth $8.5bn (€5.9bn). Microsoft's investors appeared largely to take the view that the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. Some analysts called it reminiscent of the dot.com bubble a dozen years ago. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, called it "entirely consistent with our irrepressible, forward-looking nature".
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