By ? Engudam. S
Well, you heard the news: Microsoft is going to buy Skype for $8.5 billion. It?s the most money Microsoft has ever spent for anything.
The ones who think the deal is a good idea ? say that Microsoft [MSFT 24.69?? can use Skype?s voice and video technology to build into its products, like Windows and Kinect.
But that?s such a weird analysis, since Windows and Kinect already have voice and video built in. Hello? NetMeeting? Windows Live Messenger?
The difference, of course, is that nobody used those programs. At least not compared with the 170 million people who use Skype every month, including close to 9 million of them who actually pay for the service. (You pay, for example, if you want to make voice calls to telephone numbers, rather than other computers or phones.)
?It?s an amazing customer footprint,? Ballmer said in a Times interview. ?And Skype is a verb, as they say.?
And so is ?Google.? I?d be willing to guess that this purchase was as much about ?look what we?ve got, Google!? as it is about Microsoft?s technology strategy.
Every time some big clumsy corporate behemoth buys a popular consumer-tech product, I cringe. It almost never works out. The purchased company?s executives take a huge payday; promises are made all around that they?ll be allowed to continue operating independently; and then, within a couple of years, the product disappears altogether. A little star of the tech sky is snuffed out, for absolutely no good reason.
Yahoo bought GeoCities, Broadcast.com, HotJobs.com, Music Match, Konfabulator and Upcoming. AOL bought CompuServe, Netscape and Xdrive?all gone or irrelevant now. Cisco bought the Flip camcorder, and then killed it last month.
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