Skype maintains independence within Microsoft

President of Skype, Tony Bates (Tony Bates) tells how Microsoft is not very successful attempts to integrate Skype into their products.May 10, 2011 Microsoft announced the purchase of Skype - since more than a year, in October of 2011 the deal was approved by the Commission. Skype has become the largest acquisition in the history of Microsoft, but the company still can not fully digest the $ 8.5-billion-dollar asset.The first year under the power of Microsoft for the Skype company went well. Over the past seven months, active audience Skype has increased greatly, especially if you look at the number of concurrent users are online. Microsoft is constantly working to "digest" the purchased assets. The work is proceeding on all fronts, and Steve Ballmer calls regularly Bates on Skype to discuss progress in this direction.The most difficult co-workers Skype, of which 44% work in Tartu and Tallinn. Immediately after the purchase of Ballmer personally flew to Tallinn office and was a traditional rite of initiation into the developers Skype, drinking a cocktail of "Red Dog" of tequila, sambuca and Tabasco sauce. With offices in Estonia, Sweden, Luxembourg, Prague and London, Skype is the only division at Microsoft, which is completely located outside its headquarters in Seattle. This is slightly worse control and loyalty of staff. For example, staff recently did pass a new office, and they refused to take the standard "badges" with the logo of Microsoft. Company President Tony Bates insisted that passes a logo on Skype.If a higher loyalty is not as good, with improved infrastructure VoIP-service Microsoft does best. Recently the company has successfully replaced conventional supernody Skype's own machines, which are placed on the hosting of Microsoft and work on a protected distribution Linux. Now, instead of 48 + thousand supernodov P2P-Skype network traffic passes through the 10 + thousand sites on hosting Microsoft, that has significantly improved system security and quality of service, given the rapidly increasing number of users. Each supernod in the old system could handle about 800 users, and new nodes can Microsoft keep up to 100,000 connections.The biggest stage in the development of the product will be a release of Skype for Windows 8 is in the autumn of this year. Due to this, the plates on Windows are required to obtain a competitive advantage - this was the main point of purchase Skype, analysts say.In addition, Microsoft plans to integrate Skype into the system Lync (corporate communications product), and the Xbox 360. For the Skype company opened more than 400 jobs, including a specialist in HTML5 for the development of browser-based version.