Microsoft Bought Skype For $8.5 bn

Microsoft bought Skype.

This is the deal I never anticipate will happen.

The quick fact is that Skype was bought by eBay in 2006 and then eBay sold it out(as in cutting lost) to a group of private investors in 2009 and then these investors sold it to Microsoft for US $8.5 billion.

Another report fact is that Skype made a lost of US $7 million for financial year 2010. It is hard to imagine that with so much talents and resources, business is still a challenge for them.

This proves that Microsoft is still go in terms of business, still has the money and is making money. At least they have US $8.5 billion.

Why Microsoft did it is pretty obvious, they want to own the VoIP software technology, it is purely software based it is good for Microsoft which doesn't have solid hardware based business.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says that he is interested with the exploding number of users.

So what do we learn here ?

1.) If you can't make enough money, keep up the momentum of innovation and acquiring users.

2.) Microsoft didn't have the time to build similar version of Skype even though it already have MSN live. US $8.5 bn is much cheaper to do that. More importantly, it is the users and the brand which is more critical.

Comments

janny said…
The price tag is silly on a stand-alone basis, but the deal could make strategic sense for Microsoft: With the rise of Facebook and Gmail and Apple, the company has lost its dominance of online communications.
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