What Microsoft Buying Skype Means For Us

It has been confirmed today that Microsoft are to buy Skype in a $8.5bn deal. Certainly a bit of surprise news, as the last I saw it was Facebook who were seriously in the running to take it over. Well, I suppose times move quickly in the world of technology.

So, what does this mean for the average user of Skype? Does it mean anything? Does it mean it just gets a new parent and it’ll continue to tick along as it has been doing so far? Or are we to expect major changes with it’s architecture in the coming months changing the user experience completely?

Well, answer is nobody knows as yet, we will have to wait and see. As will be clear to most by now on this blog, I’m not the world’s biggest lover of Microsoft products overall, and I was rather disheartened when I heard this news earlier this morning. When I think of Microsoft tools, I think overly-engineered, long ridiculous product key passwords, paperclips asking if you’re sure you want to perform a task of any sort, and generally releasing things into the public long before they’re ready. (And that comes from techie people I know as well, not just from my own bias).

It’s fairly well documented that Skype doesn’t exactly make a lot of profit, last year apparently they made a $7m loss, and it’s very much unclear at this stage what Microsoft  plans to do in terms of it’s future development and implementation; especially given the price they bought it for, it’s a risky purchase to say the least. How will Microsoft make any money from it ongoing?

Is it just a claw-back for attention so Microsoft have a household name again on the internet? – Especially since Apple have recently been announced the most valuable brand in the world, overtaking Microsoft and even Google. Something Steve Ballmer certainly won’t be happy with!

So, what is the direction and future of Skype as we know it? Destined for innovation and improvement or doomed to failure?

6 thoughts on “What Microsoft Buying Skype Means For Us

  1. I think Microsoft are trying to bring a decent VoIP type system that they can build into the Console space as well as their mobile handsets.

    A lot of people are worried about whether Microsoft will drop support for the mac version but Ballmer has said they will not drop support for iOS and Mac platforms which is good news and with the funding now avaliable its hard to see how this can be a bad thing.

    I do think that the price at which Microsoft aquired skype was a bit steep considering the losses that skype has had in the past. Also, only a few months ago skype was valued at a fraction of what MS paid. With that being said i did hear Facebook, Google and even Apple were in talks at one point so who knows.

    -Adam

    • Hey Adam, thanks for your thoughts 🙂

      Yeah, if they ever did drop Mac support it would be incredibly juvenile of them, and just make them look stupid. Hopefully they’ll do something good with it. Fingers crossed they won’t flood it with ads and bloatware, and leave it as a standalone product.

      Totally agree with the overly inflated price they bought it for…..was a bit odd.

  2. $8.5bn? I’m in the wrong business! Should leave voice overs and rather do VOIP 🙂

    Now that Microsoft has bought them, Skype will probably become really awkward to use with lots of pop-up windows and viruses…

    • That is certainly my fear, yes!

      However, given an open letter Doug Turkel wrote last year to Skype re. their 720p HD video calling capabilities, he asked whether it would be a possible development, for the benefit of VO’s/audio agencies/production houses, to allow higher bandwidth capabilities for audio-only calls, 256k upwards to be a serious contender for ISDN substitute. I think that would be MASSIVE if it were so. I’d happily pay good money for that.

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