News Microsoft buys Skype for £5.2 billion

Microsoft has bought popular VOIP service Skype, gaining access to its 600 million users.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2011/05/11/microsoft-buys-skype-for-5-2-billion/1

 

I fear the reverse Midas touch...

 

Reverse? Skype are already a loss-making company.

 

I'm not really sure how this will effect current Skype users. The plus for Microsoft is that it now owns a Live messenger alternative so I imagine some merge in products in the future.

Don't see it as bad for Skype since for all their customer base, the profits haven't really been that impressive.

 

For Skype that's amazing. Well, for the people running Skype, at least. They made a boatload of money for a company that's practically just about getting even year after year.

MS will try to integrate Skype into everything now, I guess. From Live Messenger to Kinect, possibly even WP7. Could be interesting to see how they do it.

 

"able to turn a profit of $20.6 million in 2010."

Have i missed something here?

 

So, Skype has:
- Ugly, inconsistent and confusing UI on Windows
- Proprietary protocol that locks out competitors
- Aggressive installation process that installs browser plugins you don't want
- Terrible mobile phone software
- Weird port hijacking problems

Let's hope Microsoft can fix all that for them..

 

Exactly what I was thinking. Do some people not read the article and just comment on the headline or what?

 

why would they fix them when they can just 'integrate' them all into other products?

as previously suggested, Kinect WILL get skype support- if it didn't, MS deserve to lose money, and WP7 will get this- easy way for MS to crowbar an equivalent to FaceTime and GoogleTalk Video into their portfolio.

 

So Live Messenger will now probably come with Skype built in? I don't have a problem with that.

 

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told the BBC that 'if you use Skype today, you're going to be able to continue to use Skype...

...for a price

 

Probably part of their strategy for windows mobile I should imagine.

 

Fix the memory leaks and I don't care who owns it.

 

did read somewhere that it was going to be intergrated with Kinect.

 

Bye-bye free Skype calls!

Oh well. The sooner they do that, then the sooner SIP clients can take over.

 

Sweet! I was thinking to myself last night that I would LOVE Skype over Kinect as an alternative to the stupid (and relatively useless) Kinect Chat application. Also, I'm kind of glad that Google now has a bit of competition to their all-in-one Google service suite, though it seems M$ is always a day late.

Finally, +1 to ch424's post. Skype's UI is what caused me to switch to Google Video Chat. If I brought that to a customer at an end-of-sprint demo, I'd be fired.

 

If we do the maths, we see that MS just paid over 400 years worth of Skype's profits. There must be some pretty tasty patents/technology in there!

 

I heard that this buyout is somewhat of a stick to Google, who was considering buying Skype themselves.

 

I hope they don't merge it into Windows Live, myself and my girlfriend use Skype for webcam, because Windows Live sucks and the cam freezes for no reason

 

ok this isn't me being pedantic, i'm genuinely interested

at one point i'm certain the US billion was one hundred thousand million, whereas the UK billion was one million million.

is this still the case or have they been equalised?

if they haven't been then surely it's much less that £5.2 billion as that would be the UK use of the word billion.

i'm confuzzled