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by adamwintle 4666 days ago
Nokia sold to Microsoft for ~$1.5 billion less than what Skype was sold for
1 comments

It is $7.17 http://allthingsd.com/20130902/microsoft-to-buy-nokias-devic...

But still less than $8.5 paid for Skype. (Which I think is total waste of money)

Skype accounted for an ungodly 167 billion international call minutes in 2012. It is perhaps not fair to belittle them.
No, but it still makes me sick, because Microsoft had Skype capabilities a decade before Skype. NetMeeting, then MSN Messenger supported audio/video. Messenger even had telephone integration to call out, but poorly done (some shitty partnership that made you buy an account with MCI). They had SMS integration to a better extend that Skype does today.

But MS's MSN/Live division was so terribly run, they missed out on turning MSN into a social network (FFS, they had everyone with their friend relationships already via Messenger!), and the Messenger software didn't promote audio/voice very well, nor did the session establishment stuff work well. They sat around for over a decade and let other people overtake them for no reason other than having terrible management. (Wave 11(?) had an installer that literally took over 30 minutes, as management wanted to search your entire disk for stuff.)

Well it's not all of Nokia.