In 2011, when Microsoft acquired Skype, it had more than a hundred million users. — Pixabay
I don’t know for sure how this sort of thing works, but I imagine there was a meeting once where someone convinced Microsoft’s CEO at the time, Steve Ballmer, to spend more than US$8bil on Skype. Yes, Skype.
At the time, it was Microsoft’s largest acquisition ever. Six years earlier, eBay had bought the company for US$2.5bil, though that deal didn’t make sense at the time, and eBay was never really able to turn it into a meaningful business. It eventually took a US$1.4bil write-off and sold a majority of the company to outside investors. Eventually, Microsoft came along and there was a meeting, and the company ended up spending a lot of money on a business no one else had ever figured out how to make work.
