U.S. Trade Commission said to OK Microsoft's bid to buy Skype
Summary: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on Friday that the U.S. DOJ had cleared Microsoft to buy Skype.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on Friday that it the U.S. Department of Justice cleared Microsoft to buy Skype.
Reuters said that the FTC made note of the approval in a Web site posting on June 17.
Update (June 20): It actually wasn't the FTC that approved the Skype purchase. It was the U.S. Department of Justice. The FTC filing on Friday was simply notation of the DOJ approval.
I asked Microsoft officials whether they're still awaiting additional antitrust approval before moving forward with the acquisition. A Microsoft spokesperson said the company had no comment. But I'd expect Microsoft would still need approval in other geographic jurisdictions before the deal gets final approval.
Microsoft announced intentions to buy VOIP/video provider Skype on May 10 for $8.5 billion in cash. Officials said they were counting on the deal to secure regulatory approval before the end of calendar 2011. Microsoft is planning to make Skype a separate business division, officials said.
Microsoft is planning to integrate Skype with a variety of its consumer and business products once the deal receives regulatory approval, officials have said. Microsoft execs have said that Skype integration makes sense with everything from its Lync unified communications server/service and Hotmail, to Xbox and Kinect.
Microsoft officials said they originally had been thinking about partnering with Skype, but decided in late March/early April to make an unsolicited bid for Skype instead. Microsoft officials said the price was finalized on April 18 The deal was signed on May 9.
Originally, there were reports that Microsoft was seeking to outbid other Skype suitors, but that later seemed not to be the case.
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Talkback
RE: U.S. Trade Commission said to OK Microsoft's bid to buy Skype
The more MS products it is intergraded into the better.
MS has the resources to keep improving this software system.
Never forget, those that can get paid for their work, do.
Those cannot get paid for their work, work for free.
That is why the odds are, any paid programmer, is better at what they do than a non-paid coder.
Flame on!
RE: U.S. Trade Commission said to OK Microsoft's bid to buy Skype
The technology behind Skype is a kind of P2P piggybacking of VOIP traffic on willing machines with spare capacity. That's appropriate for a little company (in the world of telecoms, Skype is a VERY little company), and it's even kind of mischievous and cute. But this is not how a company that operates at the scale Microsoft does runs a business. Does Microsoft seriously expect to run a global VOIP service -- for money -- while cribbing bandwidth hither and yon? Skype has been getting away with murder because the telecomms guys have bigger fish to fry. But they are going to care if Microsoft starts competing with them, and the telecoms regulators in the various countries are going to start caring as well.
Microsoft knows all this. Something here does not compute.
RE: U.S. Trade Commission said to OK Microsoft's bid to buy Skype
RE: U.S. Trade Commission said to OK Microsoft's bid to buy Skype
Code I got from the freeware world kindly donated by blog authors is far better than the code written by most of my co-workers. I would even say may be half of my co-workers write very bad code. These guys will never have enough skills to write open source code!
Gotcha
I wouldn't add to this myself except that this is day-old news now.
Robert Hahn, your paranoia is running rampant
you must endevour to work on keeping it in check, as you may find yourself walking side by side with "Goliathson".
Why make a claim that Microsoft would not want to see this discussed, unless it is to plant some false attribute to something you do not want to see discussed honestly?
:|
RE: U.S. Trade Commission said to OK Microsoft's bid to buy Skype
Why don't you answer his technical point instead of acting like an admonishing finger-wag pretending to be a space alien all the time?
TROLL.
RE: U.S. Trade Commission said to OK Microsoft's bid to buy Skype
So...
How many non-Windows users will be won over to MS by this acquisition and how much do you think they'll contribute to MS' bottom line over the next five years?
RE: U.S. Trade Commission said to OK Microsoft's bid to buy Skype
A lot.
RE: U.S. Trade Commission said to OK Microsoft's bid to buy Skype
The story makes little sense, the filming is awful (intentionally) the suspense is terrible. Why is the only flash light they have this flickering thing that happens to speed up and slow down as needed???
In the end, the movie even decided to throw basic rules like gravity out the airlock when at the end of the "movie" the rocks float up (why did they float up, he was accelerating....) and turn into spiders and attack him (How could they attack him, they were floating....)
Thanks
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One has to ask what the EC thinks
I can't see why Microsoft is paying $8 Billion or whatever for Skype. Do they even know why themselves?
The EC has bigger problems right now
But yeah, I dont understand how Skype is worth 8billion.
I don't think you get it
RE: U.S. Trade Commission said to OK Microsoft's bid to buy Skype
Quo vadis
Let's say they ditch the "hitch a ride on spare capacity" model that Skype uses now in favor of big honkin' Microsoft data centers that whip the packets around at lightning speed.
OK, now all the telcos -- who also happen to be big wireless providers, and in the US a big retail distribution channel for wireless handsets -- see Microsoft as an enemy. Their likely reaction is to first push the WP phones to the back of the store, and from there out the door.
We know Microsoft plans some retail stores, but it will take them years to blanket the country the way AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint do. And when they have that, they still need wireless coverage to provide access points to their VOIP offering.
This is either a huge commitment involving the eventual transformation of Microsoft into a global wireless and VOIP provider, or it's $8 billion down the tube.
The flaw in your logical would be
That if a vendor like Verizon or AT&T pusedWP7 "out the door" because Microsoft would be competing with a different division of theirs, they would surely force the DoJ into investigating the Telecoms, something they most definitely would not want.
Microsoft may have just cornered them into a place they never believed they would be in.
:|
RE: U.S. Trade Commission said to OK Microsoft's bid to buy Skype
Nokia has been "pushed out the door" in the US, and no one has said a thing. RIM is getting pushed out, and again... no one is saying anything.
P.S. Microsoft has no Internet backbone capacity with which to operate all this fun. They can buy some, but it isn't cheap. We're talking tens of billions before they can play in AT&T's league. They could do it, but it's Bet The Company if they do.
RE: U.S. Trade Commission said to OK Microsoft's bid to buy Skype
>>Nokia has been "pushed out the door" in the US, and no one has said a thing. RIM is getting pushed out, and again... no one is saying anything.
Nokia is a device maker, where as Microsoft is not. Microsoft is a system provider and that makes it difference. Too bad, you didn't realize this.
Reminds me of MS's iView media pro disaster