The real reason (IMHO) why Microsoft bought Skype

A while ago I wrote a quick review of what I thought about Skype, and as time has gone by I’ve grown even more fond of Skype. It is a great tool, the “communication lifeline” for a great deal of us. It really doesn’t bother me how many hundreds of dollars I’ve spent on it, because it has saved me a bundle plus made my life a lot simpler.

A few months ago Microsoft decided to acquire Skype, making a lot of people very nervous. With a price tag of 8.5 billion (which apparently B is the new currency… just think of Dropbox 6.5B or Twitter/Facebook which soon will probably cost bazillions of dollars – don’t forget the most valuable company in the world, Apple at 345B). Why nervous? A lot of people are wondering if MS is going to kill it or change it in a way so that it is not as useful anymore.

I’ve thought long and hard at why are they doing this if they already have MSN, Live Messenger, Lync which can do pretty much the same and maybe even Lync is actually better.

For me the reason is very simple, so I am going to cut this blog post short:

Skype has my credit card on file, same as millions of others around. We trust Skype even further with autorecharge. How many of you have your credit card on file with Microsoft?

Microsoft did not buy a technology, they bought millions of credit cards on file so that they can be linked directly to XBox for people to buy directly from MS.

Apple has done a great job on this too, they have my card on the Apple Store. Why hasn’t Microsoft been able to do the same?

Also, given they haven’t been able to, this is how much money they are losing in their online business -> http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-microsoft-online-operating-income-2011-1.

IMHO it was so simple… What do you think?