Microsoft has just announced that it will purchase Skype for $8.5bn.
On the surface of it it seems as though it's a great purchase with possible integration with Xbox, Windows Phone 7, Live.com etc. But has it come at too high a cost?
In 2009, 70% of Skype was sold for $2bn. 2 years later, it's bought for $8.5bn? I doubt that Skype's value has increased to the degree which justifies the price and the stock market seems to agree - Microsoft's share price is down slightly for the day by 0.62%, in spite of the NASDAQ gaining 1.01%.
If Microsoft can integrate it successfully with the rest of it's products, it may be able to create an even stronger suite which might also strengthen it's case against iOS from Mac and Linux. There may not be any direct profits, but may be worth it when considering total sales and products.
It's yet too be seen whether this will be the right decision...
I came upon an interesting article this morning about HP presenting the Linux based WebOS which it acquired when buying Palm Computing as its future and "dumping Microsoft Windows.
http://mybroadband.co.za/news/business/19279-HPs-bold-move.html
Not that WebOS is new, or that Windows is going to be totally left out in the cold, but it certainly seems to have a slightly higher profile now. So, it's going to compete head on with Android and probably a host of other Linux based OS's. Once again, the question around a fragmented Linux world comes to mind. There seems to be very little consensus - Many people and myself think that it's hindering progress to some degree. Maybe there isn't a single silver bullet to solve all problems, but do we need all these "flavours"?
I wonder how much overlap is there between the different projects? I'm pretty sure that there's a growing pool of developers, tools, code base, drivers, standards etc. which can only be a good thing. Another thing is that since HP is one of the biggest hardware manufacturers in the world, I'm guessing that hardware support can't be hurt either. So, in spite of another OS "on the market", I'm sure that overall it's going to be a positive impact.
I've just got back from the Champagne Sports Resort in the Drakensberg which was the location for the South African regional finals for the 2009 Imagine Cup. The global competition is sponsored by Microsoft who very kindly put us up for the 1st - 3rd December at the wonderful Champagne Sports Resort. Many universities from around the country were represented by one or more teams with the final winning team being flown to Egypt in June 2009. With such high stakes, the competition was tough, with every team having an interesting project on display. The entries ranged from Masters theses to 3rd year IS projects. The event seemed to be well run and organized, but I hoped that there would be more public to view the awesome projects. I suppose being in the central Drakensberg, it wasn't unexpected.
Unfortunately, we didn't win, so for us, after a long road the competition is over. But, we did make some contacts in the radio industry and got good feedback regarding our project. After a huge amount of work and finally getting everything running relatively smoothly, it's a bit of an anticlimax just leaving it. I'm hoping to take the project further next year and see how that develops.
So, here goes - the breaking news... The winning project was a Masters project (A collaboration from UCT and Stellenbosch I think) which converted sign language performed by a person standing in front of a camera to text and finally to synthesised speech. Unfortunately I don't remember the guys names, so I can't give credit to them, but I'm sure I'll run into their names pretty soon as blogs/ news sites are updated. They claim that the difficult/ innovative part of the system is that it uses only one camera. This comes into play in that with one camera, depth has to be determined without the use of "bifocal vision". I think that the final aim of this research is to port the technology to cellphones which would allow a dumb person to use their cellphone and "speak" to a hearing person unable to understand sign language via sign language.
From what I've heard, research into this field has been going on for the past few years at UCT and therefore I think that the project has a good chance of doing well overseas. Good luck to the unnamed students - I'll be following your progress. (And updated this blog if I find your names.)
