Why Microsoft is Buying Skype for $8.5 Billion

Microsoft has bought Skype for $8.5 billion, in an all cash deal. The deal closed a few hours ago.. The Wall Street Journal confirmed the news after the announcement is likely to come out later today or tomorrow morning, according to several reports. Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft is said to be a big champion of the deal, the largest in the history of the company. Ballmer and Skype CEO Tony Bates will host a press conference in a few hours.

SKYPE CEO Tony Bates

 

It won’t surprise me if Microsoft comes in for major heat on this decision to buy Skype — and the software company could always botch this purchase, as it often does when it buys a company. The Skype team is also full of hired guns who are likely to move on to the next opportunity rather than dealing with the famed Microsoft bureaucracy.

I also don’t believe that Facebook and Google were serious buyers. Google, with its Google Voice offering, doesn’t really need Skype. In essence, I feel that Microsoft was bidding against itself. Even then, I personally think this is a bet worth taking, especially for a company that has been left out in the cold for so long.

• Skype gives Microsoft a boost in the enterprise collaboration market, thanks to Skype’s voice, video and sharing capabilities, especially when competing with Cisco and Google.
• It gives Microsoft a working relationship with carriers, many of them looking to partner with Skype as they start to transition to LTE-based networks.
• It would give them a must-have application/service that can help with the adoption of the future versions of Windows Mobile operating system.
• However, the biggest reason for Microsoft to buy Skype is Windows Phone 7 (Mobile OS) and Nokia. The software giant needs a competitive offering to Google Voice and Apple’s emerging communication platform, Facetime.

Why Did Skype Want To Sell?

Skype had filed for an IPO and was going to do about a billion dollars in revenues and was on its way to becoming profitable. So why sell? Silver Lake and eBay were both getting impatient and wanted to lock in their profits. Some sources also believe that Skype’s revenues had stalled.

The company had bet heavily on is video sharing service. The premium version of video calling and sharing was a way for Skype to increase its average revenue per user and move into the enterprise market. However, given Skype’s DNA is that of a consumer Internet company, the challenges are not a surprise.

founders of SKYPE

 

 

 

 

So Who Made What?

• Using the $8.5 billion price as the likely sale price, eBay gets $2.55 billion for its 30 percent stake in Skype. So in the end, eBay did make money on the Skype deal.

  Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the co-founders with their 14-percent stake, take home about $1.19 billion. Damn, these guys know how to double dip!

• Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) own 56 percent of the company and that stake is worth $4.76 billion.
• Andreessen Horowitz had 3 percent of the deal and made $205 million profit on their $50 million initial investment.

A Look at 35 Years of Interface Design

Back to the Past: Bill Buxton Shows Off 35 Years of Tech Devices,Microsoft Research’s Bill Buxton has unboxed, unearthed, and organized his personal collection of interactive tech devices gathered over the last 35 years. The collection will be on display at an international interaction design conference this week and could end up as a display in a museum.

Buxton has accumulated hundreds of items that struck him as interesting, unusual or important to the evolution of interactive devices – watches, keyboards, mice, an electronic drum set, a 60-year-old transistor radio whose design inspired the iPod, a Nintendo Power Glove, several Etch-A-Sketches, and even the first so-called “smart” phone – controlled by a touch-screen - first shown in 1993, 14 years before smart phones exploded onto the scene.

A look at 35 years of collection:

Input Devices
Buxton's selection of input devices includes (clockwise from upper left) an original telegraph keyset; the Green Eye Mouse – the first mouse Microsoft sold; the Swiss mouse, with a roller mechanism designed by yes, a watch maker; and Data Hand, which aimed to reduce arm fatigue by enabling each finger to choose a character by selecting from a radial menu. View the entire collection online.

 

Touch Devices
Touch devices in the collection include (clockwise from upper left) the Arc Touch, which morphs from flat to arch; a touch controller Buxton used in two-handed input studies back in 1985; the UnMouse stand-alone touchpad; and the iGesture Pad, created by a small company that started making multi-touch touchpads and was later bought by Apple. View the entire collection online.

 

Frog Pad
The FrogPad is a one-hand keyboard available for the left or right hand. The left and right keyboard versions are mirror images of each other. View the entire collection online.

 

 

 

 

Swiss Champ XAVT
This Swiss Army Knife is the equivalent of a bloated application, Buxton says. "It has so many great additions that it is useless — except to collectors like me who find extreme cases of bad design charming or useful." Visit the collection today.

 

 

 

 

Explore the Collection Online
Bill Buxton's vast array of tech devices from the past 35 years is available to experience online via an extensive visual database built using Microsoft PowerPivot. Visit the collection today.

 

 

 

 

“I’m just bad at throwing stuff out,” joked Buxton last week, as the movers came by to transport his entire collection to Vancouver, British Columbia, for display at the 2011 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) this week.

“A lot of people, even people working in the field, have no idea these objects exist,” said Buxton, a principal researcher for Microsoft Research. “Those of us in the Internet Age with the most access to search engines have the least knowledge about our past. We’re so obsessed with the future that we only look forwards. I’ve been collecting specifically to counter that – to show how deep the roots go.”

A leading expert in human-computer interactions, Buxton frequently teaches, speaks and writes on the subject of natural user interface, or NUI, in which technology incorporates more human-friendly means of “input” such as touch, face- and voice-recognition, and movement sensors.

“One of the great things about Bill is the way he shares his enthusiasm for design and technology with other people,” said Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research. “It’s infectious. It also reflects his enthusiasm for teaching. Bill has been one of the most influential people in the field of design and human-computer interaction for many years, and the collection is really representative of his love and dedication to the field which he’s impacted so much.”

origin:Microsoft News Center

Messenger connect to support OAuth 2.0

On a news Messenger connect next will support OAuth 2.0, Microsoft has promised that the next iteration of Messenger connect will be designed to play nice with version 2.0 of OAuth by default.

 

As Dare Obasanjo said “The Windows Live team is pleased to announce the  support for OAuth 2.0 in the next version of developer platform, Messenger Connect, which allows developers to build sites and applications that use data from the Windows Live network,” 

“This development builds on an existing commitment to open web standards shown in the current version through our implementation of ActivityStrea.ms, OAuth Wrap, Portable Contacts, & OData.”

Messenger Connect already offers developers the possibility to leverage OAuth, and taken into consideration the company’s latest announcement, the same will be valid for the next version of the standard.

Just as it is the case with OpenID, OAuth is about providing access to third-parties to specific content. However, there’s a fundamental difference between the two, and it’s related to identity.
With OAuth, web developers can take advantage of an API which permits them to offer services to users, but without requiring them to share their credentials.
“OAuth provides a method for clients to access server resources on behalf of a resource owner (such as a different client or an end-user),” reads an excerpt of OAuth’s description.
“It also provides a process for end-users to authorize third-party access to their server resources without sharing their credentials (typically, a username and password pair), using user-agent redirections.”