My view on Microsoft’s purchase of Skype

News just out today is that Microsoft have made an unsolicited, all cash purchase ($8.5B) of Skype’s business to create a new business unit within Microsoft where Skype’s CEO, Tony Bates will become President of the business unit and report directly to Steve Bullmer.

Microsoft have communicate via a joint webcast that they are committed to continuing the delivery of Skype’s services in the same cross platform model that Skype has today. While there will be a focus on accelerating the integration of Skype into the current Microsoft portfolio for unified communicated with their Lync solution, they understand that device independence is key gaining market penetration and end user adoption.

For me the biggest reason for the purchase is that it allows Microsoft to quickly close the gap that they have in the UC market for mobile communications and of course, mobile video. Microsoft have had desktop video for some time and have recently had the option of some room based video conferencing through the Kinect launch but these have been very silo’ed to date. Skype have done a better job of getting video delivered throughout the mobile, desktop and living room spaces.

Enterprise telephony strategy/gain is still not clear, both Microsoft and Skype have struggled with their positioning over recently years and I can’t see a clear benefit just at the moment other than the Skype in/out capability.

My final thought is that Microsoft have gained a much better audio codec (SILK) with the purchase of Skype.

View the announcement yourself and see what you make of the news!

Image role of the slides presented at the announcement:

Tags: Codec, Kinect, Lync, Microsoft, Opinion, Review, SILK, Skype, VoIP

This entry was posted on 10 May, 2011 at 10 May, 2011 and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.