Why did Microsoft agree to buy Skype?

When I first heard the rumor that Microsoft might buy Skype, I posted on twitter "noooooo". I had immediate fears that Microsoft would flub the opportunity the same way Cisco did when it bought WebEx ( Hello, join your Call Manager Islands ). 

It was my preference (because they care about my opinion) that Skype merge with Google or Facebook. I use Microsoft products and am a huge fan of Microsoft OneNote. I was terrified that Microsoft would buy them and kill the product by trying to merge it with OCS / Lync or some other enterprise product that is impossible to install or maintain without an IT staff.

After I got over the shock, I started thinking about why Microsoft would buy them, what would they gain? The first thing that came to mind of course, was to block Google or Facebook from invading their messaging territory. Then I remembered how Facebook has been playing around with voice chat options, and especially how Bing and Facebook have been buddying up.

There it is. While there may be a lot of other reasons, I think perhaps the best reason is to entrench their relationship with Facebook, especially in the light of the ongoing conflict between Facebook and Google regarding search. Google has been so desparate to get any Facebook information from third party sources, that they are unreasonably preferencing sites that use the Facebook Open Graph meta tags in their 'head' section. You can test this by posting articles on similar sites and using the OG tags on one and not the other. Test your Open Graph / OG tags here. #seo hack ?

The secondary reason I imagine they want Skype is because of the breadth of platform. Windows, Mac, Android, and iPhone/iPad all will run Skype in varying degrees ( some don't do video yet ). This gives Microsoft and existing communications foothold on a lot of platforms, especially mobile. Windows 7 phone launched to late to compete in this generation of smartphone, but Skype could let them bridge some interesting communication features.

I am sure there are a lot of other benefits, but like the discussed purchase of Yahoo, the last time I checked Skype did not run on Windows servers. I don't even think their website runs on a Windows server. This is not necessarily a bad thing as evidenced by the PSN Outage and even by a significant Skype Outage last year. It just means running parallel systems for some time. It will be interesting to see what intellectual property and other goodies Microsoft aquires in the process as well. Microsoft is a great enterprise software company, but their consumer products have met with mixed ends.