We all know that Microsoft is buying Skype making it its biggest ever deal of $8.5 billion but if you see Skype's history, Google had almost owned Skype. When Google came to know that eBay is selling Skype, executives jumped on the opportunity and began negotiating
But Google's product manager Wesley Chan went Europe to see Skype firsthand and he became convinced that the purchase was a bad idea for Google. He concluded that one of Skype's key assets its peer-to-peer technology was a mismatch for Google, which worked on the newer paradigm of cloud computing. Peer-to-Peer never worked with Google as it eats up bandwidth and Google takes it as a past generation technology.
So even if Google would have bought Skype, it will have to re-write the whole platform which will take around 1-2 years. This is why Chan decided to sabotage the deal in a top executive meeting and the co-creator of Ad-Words, Salar Kamangar backed him up in this. They came up fully prepared even with a powerpoint design to support their point and executives started getting really negative towards the deal. The point put up by Chan was : Why would I want this risk? We have a team capable of building the carrier, we have the users, we have hundreds of millions of Gmail users, why do we need to have Skype?
This is how Google almost owned Skype before Microsoft finalized the deal. Only future can tell us this decision of Google is going to be a fortune for Microsoft or another failure of its we division.
But Google's product manager Wesley Chan went Europe to see Skype firsthand and he became convinced that the purchase was a bad idea for Google. He concluded that one of Skype's key assets its peer-to-peer technology was a mismatch for Google, which worked on the newer paradigm of cloud computing. Peer-to-Peer never worked with Google as it eats up bandwidth and Google takes it as a past generation technology.
So even if Google would have bought Skype, it will have to re-write the whole platform which will take around 1-2 years. This is why Chan decided to sabotage the deal in a top executive meeting and the co-creator of Ad-Words, Salar Kamangar backed him up in this. They came up fully prepared even with a powerpoint design to support their point and executives started getting really negative towards the deal. The point put up by Chan was : Why would I want this risk? We have a team capable of building the carrier, we have the users, we have hundreds of millions of Gmail users, why do we need to have Skype?
This is how Google almost owned Skype before Microsoft finalized the deal. Only future can tell us this decision of Google is going to be a fortune for Microsoft or another failure of its we division.
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