Skype CEO To Become President Of Microsoft Voice

Skype CEO Tony Bates will become president of Microsoft’s voice division, when the $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype has cleared regulatory hurdles, according to a video press conference.

The acquisition – the largest Microsoft has ever made – will enable Skype to expand to billions of users, said Bates, at a joint conference with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Peter Klein, chief financial officer of Microsoft. The companies will explore “tremendous amounts of monetisation opportunities,” he commented.

Revenue: more ads on Skype?

The main revenue opportunity mentioned in the conference was advertising: “We are just scratching the surface,” said Bates. “We only just started in ads.” The adverts would be a natural extension for the user experience, he said, suggesting the ads would include media and be a “rich experience”.

Ballmer suggested that the combined products of the two companies would work to encourage more people to use video conferencing, describing a scenario where a Kinect and a TV use Skype to create a home video conferencing suite for “a few hundred bucks.”

Although Skype has more than 600 million registered users, the two settled on 170 million as a figure for “connected users”, ie those who regularly use the service, using on average more than 100 minutes per month.

The two promised to continue developing the Skype user base, with Ballmer promising that “products and services that Skype users know and love today will simply grow.”

Skype will continue to be supported on non-Microsoft platforms, said Ballmer, scotching the idea that Microsoft’s partner Nokia would now get preferential treatment.

Microsoft’s bid came after Google and Facebook were reported to be interested in buying Skype, despite the fact that the company lost around $7 million last year on turnover of $860 million. Addressing the suggestion that Microsoft might have paid too much, the two said that Skype had a robust business that was growing rapidly.