Microsoft to buy Skype

[Fish]

Apparently, Microsoft is buying Skype. One wonders why; they already have MSN Messenger (which they also acquired) and their Xbox Live voice streaming. Some people evidently now worry that Microsoft will drop Skype support for non-Windows platforms, or gut the software of its useful components and scrap the rest. Other people figure that Microsoft can turn this billion-dollar debt machine into something with actual revenue, but perhaps that means calls will no longer be free.

Your thoughts?

[Mako]

I expect they bought it so that no-one else (Google) could. Still, that's an awful lot of change to drop on a company that's making a loss and has half a billion in debt.

I read somewhere that Skype has 8m paying customers. Which means that at $8.5BN (including the debt), Each customer is worth just over $1000. Doesn't seem right to me somehow.

[Fish]

Google would've bought it to keep it out of Facebook's hands. Don't they already have a web-phone-email-message service? I mean, so does Microsoft, but still.

[Tuckerfan]

I would say I was worried about Microsoft fucking Skype up, but from the reviews of Skype 5 that I've heard, MS couldn't do any worse.