With the acquisition of Skype Microsoft pays a huge amount of dollars probably not so much for the proprietary technology of Skype but for the user data of Skype users.
And user-data is the holy grail for advertisement. A lot of phone carries worry about the availability of Skype on smartphones, lowering their gains, and losing turnover, they can’t compensate that with the tariffs for mobile internet.
Phone carriers are becoming mobile internet providers, nothing more, and if they try to exploit that, they take the risk of being out of the game.
Most smartphone traffic is geo-tagged and gives valuable info about users, their location and WIFI-networks. Actually the location services work faster with analysing WIFI data then GPS. Google Streetview wasn’t only for the photo’s, the funny-looking camera-cars did something more important: collecting data about WIFI-networks. The photo’s add to the internet experience, the WIFI networks to the advertisement opportunities of Google.
Skype will give Microsoft access to this invaluable data of the Android and iPhone mobile platform. Together with the Nokia deal that’s worth something. The future will show if Microsoft can make a stronghold on the mobile markets with all these investments. Advertisement offer better gaining opportunities then selling proprietary software, especially in the cloud area.
Are we all going to heaven?
