“After paying $8.5bn for Skype, what will Microsoft end up with? In a few years, I forecast it will be this: $8.5bn less in its bank accounts, a cats-in-a-bag fight between its Office division and its Online Services division over integration of the service, little – if any – kudos from consumers, and no appreciable effect on its bottom line,” Charles Arthur reports for The Guardian.
“That’s right: Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, might as well have put the money on a bonfire for all it’s going to do for the company’s share price, which has barely shifted in his 11-year tenure,” Arthur reports. “In fact at present, the share price reckons that Microsoft is less valuable as a single entity than if it were broken up.”
Arthur reports, “The trouble is that Skype is one of those great internet ideas that can’t be integrated into as many places as you might think. That’s partly because it uses its own protocols for the voice-over-internet system (which means it can’t be integrated into other VoIP services). But it’s also because even while all of our analogue conversations are being digitised, the phone system is one of those technologies so deeply embedded in our culture that you can’t get it out. When I called Skype’s people for comment on the talk of acquisition, it was a mobile phone number, not a Skype handle, that I looked for.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related article:
Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion; company’s largest-ever acquisition – May 10, 2011
