I find it hard to believe that a huge amount of money can be quietly booked by a publicly traded company without it raising all kinds of hard-to-answer questions from employees in many departments, as well as the outside auditors. Even more so that it was actually the monetization strategy approved by the board for the acquisition.
Here's a more conventional theory why they bought Skype. Around 2010, Microsoft is already moving toward a huge investment in mobile, where they've been completely blindsided by the staggering growth of iOS and Android. Their investment in Bing has not really paid off, and fighting Google on search has arguably been a distraction while this new-fangled iPad is about to destroy their entire PC market.
One major gap for their mobile strategy is a messaging platform. Windows Live Messenger capped out and is on the decline. They can build a new platform from scratch, but Windows Phone needs a tool that drives preference over iOS or Android. I'm not sure what their plan A was before Skype became available to buy, but it made sense as a plan B when it was for sale. With over half a billion users, it starts to look like a $10 CPA for customers.
Mobile also helps explain the shift toward client-server (as questioned by UnoriginalGuy below). If you had used Skype for mobile before, you'd know that it was basically a battery testing app. I haven't touched Skype much in the past year, but I think it's clearly improved.
"I find it hard to believe that a huge amount of money can be quietly booked by a publicly traded company without it raising all kinds of hard-to-answer questions from employees in many departments, as well as the outside auditors."
I don't know anything about what happened, but Microsoft must be one of the easiest companies to send a gift in a hidden way. Lets say the NSA bought Windows Vista upgrade licenses for a couple of million servers, then upgraded them to Windows 7 and form there to Windows 8, instead of doing what sane people do (upgrade from XP to a mix of Windows 7 and Linux). If you also upgrade SQL Server, Active Directory, etc, frequently and buy copious amounts of Remote Desktop licenses, I bet you could get the bill into the billions. And you don't even have to install that software, or even download it from Microsoft's servers.
Yes, it would raise suspicion that the NSA buys Windows licenses, even more so that they buy them at retail price, but I doubt that the auditors at the NSA are 100% independent from the NSA, so they would just (be ordered to) ignore it, and the NSA could route the buys through quite a few shadow companies, making it hard to spot anything suspicious for those working at Microsoft.
Aren't NSA's full accounts pretty deeply secret http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.11/patton_pr.html ? so I think the only real issue would be tidying up the MS end. Another obvious way to funnel money into MS is through sweet deals on buying or licensing patents.
Here's a more conventional theory why they bought Skype. Around 2010, Microsoft is already moving toward a huge investment in mobile, where they've been completely blindsided by the staggering growth of iOS and Android. Their investment in Bing has not really paid off, and fighting Google on search has arguably been a distraction while this new-fangled iPad is about to destroy their entire PC market.
One major gap for their mobile strategy is a messaging platform. Windows Live Messenger capped out and is on the decline. They can build a new platform from scratch, but Windows Phone needs a tool that drives preference over iOS or Android. I'm not sure what their plan A was before Skype became available to buy, but it made sense as a plan B when it was for sale. With over half a billion users, it starts to look like a $10 CPA for customers.
Mobile also helps explain the shift toward client-server (as questioned by UnoriginalGuy below). If you had used Skype for mobile before, you'd know that it was basically a battery testing app. I haven't touched Skype much in the past year, but I think it's clearly improved.
Skype's business fundamentals aren't doing half-bad either: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/02/15/still-think...