Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
24 published records
01 / evaluation
“Like now we’re shifting to this world where search result ads don’t work when people are asking their phone stuff.”
02 / belief
“” You know, I think there was a path and a very viable path for Skype to go public and be a standalone public company again.”
03 / belief
“I mean it was totally separate, it was reported separate, it was a very different product. But the Microsoft acquisition I think is very clearly a product acquisition and not with the integration that you've seen into all parts of the Office Suite and other areas within the business.”
04 / belief
“I think about that in that addressable market and yet how fast it still clearly grew, and so the tech theme that I had is there was a really great, actually ironically, right at the same time that the Microsoft acquisition of Skype happened.”
05 / uncertainty
“Most people in America, I don’t know if it was most, but certainly a large portion didn’t even have broadband.”
06 / commitment
“Interestingly, the least interesting thing to me that we are going to talk about today is AT&T and Time Warner.”
07 / belief
“You know, it’s formerly known as the Skype protocol that endured until I think 2014 and from there would sort of establish this hybrid model, where they had these direct peer-to-peer nodes like we’re talking about, and super nodes.”
08 / uncertainty
“I don’t know how they would promote Joost on Skype, but it was part of the settlement.”
09 / belief
“Like we’re about to see bundling, I think, and we’ll see this stuff get recombined and then we’ll see it get re-broken out again when that’s appropriate.”
10 / belief
“I just don’t think we have enough to decide WhatsApp. I think we need to wait a little bit.”
11 / belief
“I think that was probably the plan at spinout when Silver Lake and Andreessen and the other folks invested in Skype and the spinout was that with some cleanup led by Tony Bates and others that this could be a standalone public company.”
12 / belief
“There’s obviously varying levels of that that would come with Communicator, which I believe in… I’m going to get the date wrong, but at some point it was rebranded as Lync which was something that never, I mean that was an Enterprise offering that people who had Communicator in their workplace then knew “okay, we got Lync”, and that was never a brand that was on the typical consumer’s tongues.”
13 / belief
“As good as the product is and the product market fit and even the financials. So, I think I actually net out at the same B-.”
14 / belief
“In June of 2005, they add video calling, which is funny when we think of, like when I say to somebody I'm going to Skype them today instead of doing a call, like I mean I’m going to video chat you.”
15 / evaluation
“Which is hilarious to make that analogy because like, thinking about Facebook’s brief detour and Mark Zuckerberg and those guys ended doing Wirehog in the early days of Facebook, and actually being a competing priority, they almost didn’t do Facebook because they were focused on Wirehog.”
16 / preference
“I wish they had stuck with it. But I think the issue was they couldn’t find the domain name.”
17 / prediction
“And the telecoms were highly, highly regulated, had a very inflated price scheme where there was, you know, not necessarily a collusion but at least a set expectation of how much you would charge for long distance and routing between networks and by, you know, pioneering VoIP, really coming up with this idea that, like you go around all that entirely. And I think the funniest thing to think about is in the history of network computing, everybody that had a dial-up modem, we started with our data flowing over voice lines and the way it would communicate is literally making sound over those lines.”
18 / evaluation
“I thought I was going to be way, way, way harsher. And in fact, I didn’t know I was going to do this episode years ago, but I would have called it like a D in 2012, and it seems like over time it actually is getting… It takes a long time because it’s a big ship to maneuver, but it’s the right move to have Skype and Skype for Business and not have versions of Lync and some messenger and totally deprecate Communicator.”
19 / evaluation
“I think that video, audio served a different purpose than what Slack is, a glorified IRC chat.”
20 / evaluation
“Yup, fantastic business. And eBay, we’ve been pretty hard on them I think justifiably so thus far, but they did make quite a bit of money on Skype because they sold a 65% share at the spinout but then they retained 30%.”
21 / prediction
“You could just download pieces of that file from everybody else, every other node on the network. So, this is why on Napster and on Kazaa, you know, songs that were really popular were super, super fast to download because if thousands and thousands or millions of users all had that same file on their computers and they were connected to the network, you could just download little pieces of it from many thousands of different people instead of downloading, everybody going to one spot and downloading the whole file.”
22 / evaluation
“I think the New York Times had it a lot easier than many smaller regional papers because they were truly a destination site.”
23 / evaluation
“Because I think somewhere in the middle there, October of 2007, eBay did a write-down internally of the value of Skype.”
24 / evaluation
“Regardless, however, it was definitely a dumb acquisition because they made one key mistake as part of the acquisition and that was much like when the Kazaa guys sold Kazaa and they kept the technology, once again, they kept the technology.”