I’m bemused to see that Microsoft’s Grand Poobah Steve Ballmer has blundered yet again. This time, instead of Vista, the operating system that never should have seem the light of day, or Windows Phone 7, the far too little, too late, attempt to play in mobile devices, he’s wasted a cool $8.5-billion (Billion!) on Skype.
Seriously? Ballmer just burned more money than Oracle did on buying Sun for a video-conferencing and Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) company? Come on! The only thing that Skype has over any of the dozens of other video-conferencing and VoIP companies out there is brand recognition and Skype’s brand is not worth $850-million much less $8.5-billion.
I mean, come on, Microsoft already has this technology. They’ve been selling these services in products like Live Meeting and Microsoft Lync, formerly Office Communications Server, for over a decade now. Sure, hundreds of millions of people already know and use Skype, but how long will they now that Microsoft owns it? I think Harry McCracken, well-known writer and editor, hit the nail on the head when he remarked, “Skype to be rebranded as Microsoft Internet Phone Professional Premium 2012 (KIDDING!)” on Twitter. Boy, I wish I had come up with that line. That’s exactly how people will see this deal.
Ballmer’s never met a consumer-oriented technology he couldn’t foul up. Yes, many people use Skype for work video-conferencing? Why? Because it’s free, or the next thing to it, and it runs on Windows PCs, Macs, Linux PCs, and a host of other devices. Does anyone seriously think MS-Skype will really run as well as it ever has on non-Microsoft platforms? Get real. Nothing else ever did, why should Skype be any different?
What I think Ballmer was trying to do was several things. First, he wanted to give the moribund Windows Phone 7 (WP7), a kick in the pants by adding Skype VoIP to it. That’s not going to happen. Phone carriers hate, hate, the idea of VoIP on smartphones. As well they should, it cuts directly into their bottom line.
Next, I think Ballmer has delusions that Skype be a gateway drug into Windows back-end servers. This line of reasoning, which is never far from Ballmer’s business plans, is that Skype will convince business customers into buying into Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) That, in turn, with Exchange and SharePoint, would mean getting them to buy into Active Directory and Windows Servers, etc. etc.
It’s too bad that I think that Microsoft already has all the BPOS customers it’s going to get. Sure, Skype’s attractive, but people use Skype instead of Live Meeting because it’s cheaper than buying into the whole Microsoft server infrastructure thing.
