Skype Acquired By Microsoft for $8.5 Billion Dollars

[czerdrill]

Microsoft has a long record of buying great companies and running them into the ground. Not good for the end user at all.

Like what?

This should help:
Microsoft: The 15 Biggest Acquisitions And What Happened To Them

This isn't to say they don't make money. Obviously they do. And, this isn't to say that someone shouldn't sell their company to Microsoft for a S***-ton of money. (I sure would) But, the whole premise for an acquisition is to make money and not to improve usability. This is why I say the end user hurts in these situations. An acquisition could mean they'll look to integrate the product through licensing or... it could mean they'll tank it to push existing product. You typically see this with smaller companies and I highly doubt they'll tank skype but time will tell just how beneficial this will be for "us".

Ok thanks for the link. I wouldn't necessarily say it ran these companies into the ground, though. Most of the things provided in that link are still around today in some form or the other and many of them are still huge successes...

 

[leland_7]

This is list of only their biggest acquisitions (good or bad) which is good because it shows both sides of the coin. Some are big money makers and some went very wrong.

There are quite a few acquisitions by Microsoft and most are relatively smaller companies that have a following. Those smaller companies being swallowed (in one form or another) leave the users often empty handed and or frustrated by the merger because their product/program doesn't work as well as it did before the acquisition. I do not develop but I have several friends who do and have experienced this with a number of tools they use.

IMO, I wish it would have gone to Google. For the services I use of theirs they seem to have some good engineers that really think things through.

 

[Crankintopwater69]

Curious where Google and Facebook stood in all of this.
Just a few days ago they were reported as looking to buy
then suddenly MS swoops in and takes it away from them.

going to be interesting to see if there will be different versions of this
one tailored to MS phones , and another tailored to everyone else
will "special" features be left out when it comes to the rest of the world?

Yes sir,i think so!! :-(

 

[Crankintopwater69]

Even though this isn't directly Android related, it will potentially affect Android users in a big way. Today it has been officially announced that Microsoft purchased Skype for $8.5 Billion dollars. The Redmond based super-corp has promised that they will continue to develop Skype for "other platforms" besides just their own, but we will have to wait and see to what degree. Here's a quote from the press release,

Skype will support Microsoft devices like Xbox and Kinect, Windows Phone and a wide array of Windows devices, and Microsoft will connect Skype users with Lync, Outlook, Xbox Live and other communities. Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms.

You can read the full press release at the link below. This doesn't seem like very good news to me. What do you guys think?

Source: Android.net via Microsoft Full Press Release - Microsoft Acquires Skype for $8.5 Billion Dollars

This is not good news.Skype is 1 of the reasons y im jumpin ship,cos its prenstalled and i liked the way they demoed it back n jan.ooooooo well!!!!!

 

[UNC]

Like what?

Because he said so of course!!! When talking about MS and Apple, facts aren't needed, opinion alone is important... You should know that by now Czerdrill, me and you have been fighting peoples preconceived notions for awhile now.

I did say so. And what do you know... there are facts to back up my (and many others) concern.

Not really. They didn't run ANY of those companies into the ground.... Every one of the companies are in some way integrated into what MS does now. Also, you said "they have a history of driving great into the ground", which of those 15 companies would you consider great????

 

[UNC]

.... Lack of edit ....

"Great companies into the ground" not "great into the ground"

.....

 

[leland_7]

Microsoft or any company for that matter wouldn't look to acquire companies that were failing terribly and had no value. This is why I used the term "great". They potentially had something to offer either by view of tech or ridding competition.

I don't care to nitpick or comment on this any further. If you can't see a trend then you wouldn't understand an further comments from myself anyway. Plus, my new ASUS Eee pad Transformer just arrived and I've got better things to do than argues over the interwebz.

To each his own...

 

[jroc]

All I will say is I hope MS allows it on other platforms and dont try to charge alot for it. To us and to other platforms that wanna use it.

 

[UNC]

Microsoft or any company for that matter wouldn't look to acquire companies that were failing terribly and had no value. This is why I used the term "great". They potentially had something to offer either by view of tech or ridding competition.

I don't care to nitpick or comment on this any further. If you can't see a trend then you wouldn't understand an further comments from myself anyway. Plus, my new ASUS Eee pad Transformer just arrived and I've got better things to do than argues over the interwebz.

To each his own...

I'm not arguing, I'm just wondering what you are basing your statements on. In fact I do see a trend, many of the companies in that article offer services which bigger companies also offer. The nature of business in the late 20th early 21st century was driving them into the ground... MS bought them for their patents and engineers more than anything. Almost all of those examples are akin to Dish Network buying Blockbuster... Dish didn't buy them expecting Blockbuster to return to profitability, they bought them for their existing contracts which they can use to bolster their core business.

 

[leland_7]

Microsoft or any company for that matter wouldn't look to acquire companies that were failing terribly and had no value. This is why I used the term "great". They potentially had something to offer either by view of tech or ridding competition.

I don't care to nitpick or comment on this any further. If you can't see a trend then you wouldn't understand an further comments from myself anyway. Plus, my new ASUS Eee pad Transformer just arrived and I've got better things to do than argues over the interwebz.

To each his own...

I'm not arguing, I'm just wondering what you are basing your statements on. In fact I do see a trend, many of the companies in that article offer services which bigger companies also offer. The nature of business in the late 20th early 21st century was driving them into the ground... MS bought them for their patents and engineers more than anything. Almost all of those examples are akin to Dish Network buying Blockbuster... Dish didn't buy them expecting Blockbuster to return to profitability, they bought them for their existing contracts which they can use to bolster their core business.

Exactly. Swallowing the competition in one way or another and if you get some patents/ideas/engineers along the way then that's great too. The problem is MS is such a behemoth that when a company is acquired it loses the once focused view that made it so good/great to begin with.

The reason acquisitions often fail in general is pretty simple. The founders stick around and wait for their stock to vest, then go start their next venture. They perform only well enough to make the acquisition go smoothly, beyond that they don't really care how well the company does. No one is really to blame for this, it is just an inherently flawed system.

Below is a recent Newsweek article that sums up MS pretty well.
Microsoft copied Apple to make Windows. They copied Lotus and WordPerfect to make Excel and Word, then bundled those apps into a low-cost suite called Office. They copied Netscape Navigator to make Internet Explorer, and then gave it away free, tied to Windows, and killed Netscape. But then the copycat model stopped working. Why? For one thing, Microsoft got slower, while everyone else got faster. The new Web-based companies, like Yahoo and Google, needed little money to get started and could scale up quickly. Google figured out keyword-search advertising and got so big so fast that Microsoft could not drag it back. Apple rolled out the iPod and then the iTunes store, and by the time Microsoft realized that selling music online was a big market, it was too late—Apple had it sewn up. The same is true of Amazon with the online retail market, and the Kindle, and its cloud-computing services.

Basically, MS is slow but can tag along because they're so large and have enormous capital. This might mean destroying a good company that offered a great service.

 

[MoeDaddy]

This is good for MS but it doesn't really matter so much for us as there are other alternatives and google themselves have all the pieces in place to supply their own voip/video/phone service if they choose. I'm sure MS will make a better version for WP7 than android and apple but that just leaves other companies room to hit it big on the 2 market leaders. Skype isn't irreplaceable quite yet...

 

[jroc]

I had a Skype account but hadnt used it in a few years. I tried it yesterday on my unactivated Droid 1. I could actually use it was a phone by using my Wifi at home.

I tried some free SIP services and couldnt get it to work right with my Droid 1. One issue with the other services was I couldnt call my Droid X cuz the same number is associated with both phones.

With Skype, I paid for some minutes, and proceeded to call my Droid X with no problems. Other services similar to Skype will have to be able to do something like that to be equal or better IMO.

 

[jroc]

^meant to say as a phone by using my Wifi at home.