This was my unartistic take on VSee’s “corporate” structure (I don’t think we’re big enough to be corporate) after seeing Manu Cornet‘s hilarious comic Organizational Charts, picturing the organizational structures of major companies like Facebook and Google. Guess which one is Milton 
Tag Archives: Microsoft
Sold! And Skype goes to…Microsoft?
Skype, after holding off on plans to launch an initial public offering IPO and amidst rumors of possible acquisition by Cisco, Google, and Facebook, is being acquired by Microsoft for an unsolicited offer of 8.5 billion in cash.
Many analysts feel it’s a bit more than the company is worth and see it as a desperation attempt on Microsoft’s part to gain a foothold in Internet consumer markets. In particular, it hasn’t been much of a competitor in the mobile operating system market where Apple, Blackberry, and Google’s Android have pretty much got it covered. GigaOm’s Om Malik notes that it would give them a “big boost in the hotly contested enterprise collaboration market thanks to Skype’s voice, video and sharing capabilities.”
CRN’s Chad Bernston also reports that Microsoft intends for Skype “to support Microsoft devices like XBox and Kinect, Windows Phone and a number of Windows devices…[they] also plan to connect it with Lync, Outlook, Xbox Live and other communities.”
Despite Skype’s overwhelming popularity (it claims 170 million connected users, who held 207 billion minutes of voice and video conversations in 2010), it has been losing money, and the majority of it’s users use it for free.
At the end of the day, it will be interesting to see how Microsoft integrates Skype with its wide-ranging products and whether its bet on Skype will pay off.
(My Layman’s Take: Skype is losing money. Microsoft is losing money. The thing is everybody LOVES Skype, and more importantly, it’s everywhere that Microsoft isn’t–namely smartphones, iPads, and my grandmother’s computer. The question is whether this marriage between graying Microsoft and a vibrant, young Skype will result in economic bliss, epic tragedy, or even a good old American divorce.)
More Articles:
NY Times: Microsoft buys Skype for 8.5 Million
TechCrunch: Did Microsoft overpay for Skype? Hell yes — by $4.5 billion
Polycom Vaporware Announcement?
My friend Jeff Urdan, honcho of VeaMea (a friendly competitor of ours that uses a client-server architecture), sent me an interesting email yesterday with the title “A laugh for your blog?” Apparently the big guys, realizing they’re a little behind in desktop videoconferencing innovation (read: not optimized for ad hoc workflow), are using the ‘ol “vaporware” approach to slow the startups down. (Microsoft was king of that approach back in the day. Guess who’s part of this?)
Jeff was kind enough to let me publish his email in Continue reading
Microsoft Shutting Down Vine
By Rich Griffin
Reprinted from VSee Forum
Microsoft announced yesterday that they are shutting down Vine.
Vine, as you may remember, is the service that allowed alerts and communication during times of crisis when other methods may be compromised or non-existant. I’m not going to comment on Microsoft’s reasons for shutting Vine down, but I can guess that they weren’t going to make money off it by subscription or advertising (I can only imagine the worst scenario…knowing how SEO prompts ad insertions – an American Airlines ad popping up when someone posts about a plane crash, etc.)
But why post this announcement on VSee’s forum? Well, some may not know it, but VSee has – by design and since its inception; provided a means of communication when the infrastructure we take for advantage is down. As demonstrated during Strong Angel II (Strong Angel is an international humanitarian response demonstration), VSee was utilized to establish communications without benefit of internet connectivity. How? By establishing point-to-point WiFi between slightly modified (easy to do) WiFi transceivers and using VSee to provide video, voice, text, telemetry and sharing between nodes. That functionality is crucial for aid workers, military, police and civilian response angencies.
It is unfortunate that Microsoft couldn’t sustain Vine, but VSee has always provided that means of establishing connection when all other means fail. On this very solemn day, it is a good reminder that utilities exist to keep us connected and informed when things are at their bleakest.
Startups: Customer Intimacy, Simplicity, Cost of a Dollar
The discussions of the last three posts, while important to all organizations of any size, are probably most important for startups. The big guys can more easily survive a misstep in these areas.
A case in point: Microsoft has taken a decade to slowly drop in esteem amongst business as well as end users, and still has the ability to turn this around because they have both massive resources upon which to continue living upon, and because they are the entrenched, accepted platform for most business computing.
When every company is using your applications (Office) and your OS (Windows), it’s both easier to forget to listen to your customers (and vendors, and developers), but also to stay alive long enough to change course. Microsoft has forgotten, but no one is yet saying they’re a has-been company. Although with current competition from Apple, Linux and Google…and practically ceding the mobile market…well, we’ll see.
Apple is another case. They slowly lost market share and business over a decade, but survived, largely because Microsoft needed competition to differentiate them in the marketplace. Now, of course, Apple is bigger than Microsoft.
Alas, the startup has no such “too big to fail (slowly)” net. Unless you a) are the dominant player in a market, and b) have massive resources at your disposal, you cannot afford to lose sight of these three areas: Customer Intimacy, Simplicity, and the Cost of a Dollar.
An illustration of the especial need for customer intimacy: Startups usually don’t have the massive data that an entrenched company has built up over years. Likewise, Continue reading