The acquisition of Skype by Microsoft is now official

The acquisition of Skype by the giant Microsoft announced in early May was made official on Friday the acquisition of the VoIP service for $ 8.5 billion has just been finalized.

skype1 Lacquisition of Skype by Microsoft is now official

Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, from Denmark. The company was acquired by eBay in 2005, but then the company had failed to find a way to integrate the technology of Skype on the famous auction site. Skype has been sold in 2009 to investment group Silver Lake Partners for $ 2.5 billion. This year, Microsoft announced that a rumor would be highly interested in the service, and the estimated figure is just 8.5 billion.

The agreement between time spent in the hands of several organizations before being validated. While the Redmond company has received clearance from the Federal Trade Commission in the United States in June, the case has dragged a little on the side of the Commission of the European Union (until last week), the main obstacle for Microsoft, who was accused in 2009 of anti-competitive behavior against different browsers (the complaint was filed by the Norwegian company Opera Software) with respect to the direct integration of Internet Explorer in its system Windows operating system. However, the Commission finally concluded that the purchase of Skype by Microsoft was not a real threat to competition - which is part including Google.

The contract drawn up so Skype is a wholly owned division of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer announced that its CEO, Tony Bates, will serve as president of that division.

In a post on the official blog of Microsoft regarding this acquisition, Tony Bates says his desire to transform the world of communication, based on the many facets it offers, such as social networks, mobile communications and videos. Microsoft released the same day a graphic on Skype, where we learn among other things that one minute, the equivalent of six months video is transmitted by the service (YouTube gets about 48 hours of video per minute).

To date, it has 663 million users, which would connect 170 million each month. With this huge community, Skype's goal is with Microsoft, reaching the one billion daily users.

Microsoft will in turn use the technology of Skype for several of its products. It would then be introduced into the question of the Microsoft Lync (better known as the Microsoft Office Communicator), which enables a real-time communication in companies using instant messaging features, VoIP and videoconferencing. Windows Live services should at the same time experience a little touch-up "Skype", and integration is planned for the online gaming service Xbox Live and Windows Phone OS. Finally, the direct implementation of Skype in Windows have also been mentioned, still asking to install the OS if you want to install the software.

Remains to be seen how Microsoft began to exploit the potential of Skype which is still to this day, remember, a non-profit ... As application, Skype has updated its PC software from version 5.5 to of 5.6, in which the installation of the Google toolbar has suddenly disappeared from the installer. That's fair, of course.