Seeing as this is the big news today, here are my thoughts on Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype, in a nutshell:
- No one really cares about Microsoft anymore. Whatever they seem to do online is irrelevant, and the foundation for their dominance (Windows) is becoming less and less relevant as everything moves online.
- Microsoft’s attempts at becoming relevant in today’s internet have been so far useless. Like Google, they have completely failed to do anything around social networking, even though Windows Live (is that how it’s still called?) is a big player in IM. Bing barely made a scratch in Google’s prevalence, and their biggest wins have been by transparently incorporating themselves in other services, such as Facebook. Not too many people use Bing “directly”, or at least they don’t if they know what they are doing.
- Skype has survived being bought by E-bay and being sold off again, gaining users and cleaning up their legal issues in the meantime. Microsoft will have to really try hard to kill this one.
So basically, as long as Microsoft doesn’t ruin Skype (and I believe this is quite likely to happen), I couldn’t care less… Like Paul Graham said quite a few years ago, Microsoft is by now harmless.
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