LinkedIn, another acquisition, will provide work bios of the people Skypers are about to call. Teams, the company's year-old version of Slack, is being merged with Skype for Business. Microsoft has essentially turned Skype into a replacement for a corporate telephone system - with a few modern features borrowed from instant messaging, artificial intelligence and social networking. Today, Microsoft uses Skype for Business to help sell subscriptions to its cloud-based Office 365 and steal customers from Cisco.

But two years later, the company began merging the two into Skype for Business and folded that into Office.

Originally Ballmer and company pledged to let Skype operate independently from Lync, Microsoft's nascent internet phone service for corporations. three years ago, but withdrew the offer after Yahoo balked.'Skype was such an iconic brand,' he said.įocusing on corporations was a reasonable strategy and one shared by Skype's prior management. Microsoft got so desperate that it made a $47.5 billion bid to buy Yahoo Inc. An average of about 8.8 million customers per month pay to use Skype services.Īlthough it makes billions from its computer software, Microsoft has been accustomed to losing money on the Internet in a mostly futile attempt to catch up to Google Inc. The IPO, however, has been in a holding pattern. Skype lost $7 million on revenue of $860 million last year, according to papers that the company has filed since announcing its intentions last summer to launch an initial public offering of stock. Most people use Skype's free calling services, a penchant that has made it difficult for the service to make money since entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis started the Luxembourg company in 2003. The amount of calling on Skype's network totaled 207 billion minutes last year, according to regulatory documents. Skype boasts about 663 million users worldwide who make voice and video calls over the Internet.

Who owns skype today