05.10.11

Microsoft gets Skype!

Posted in Home, Work at 3:10 pm by JohnB

So it’s definite then.. Here’s the MS PR..

http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2011/may11/05-10CorpNewsPR.mspx

I thought I’d share my initial gut thoughts on this.

  1. There’s an existing revenue stream within Skype – I pay for one of the subscription services for free UK calls and there’s an option for free worldwide too at £7.99 pm – this has got to be better than Messenger or Communicator has ever produced!
  2. This smells like the creeping death of MSN… We’ve seen the the live services starting to being aggregated into O365 and there was never any money in there.
  3. There are now another set of MS partners who will be ticked off, the Telcos. It seems that the previous fear of anything PSTN related has now evaporated in Redmond. Stand by for the anti-compete suits.
  4. I tweeted this news and one of the immediate responses I got from a colleague on the games site I write for was “That could be pretty awesome if they manage to fully integrate it with things like XBL friends lists and parties.” so there’s immediate market.
  5. The client is available EVERYWHERE. And it works consistently, effectively and simply. There’s lessons to be learned there.

Interesting times.

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