"Everybody wanted to do it," Chan said, "Eric was bullish on it. "It would've been disastrous," he said.īut Google was well along on its hunt. Worse, buying Skype would have involved an extensive review process by the government, involving the Department of Justice or the FCC or both.Ĭhan figured that it would take 18 to 24 months to get through that process, during which Google would be at a standstill in the space. So if Google bought Skype, Chan concluded, it would have to rewrite the entire Skype platform.
"Peer-to-peer just eats up your bandwidth, right, it's like the old technology." "The worst thing about peer-to-peer is that it doesn't work well with Google," Chan told me during an amazing interview for "In the Plex" in February 2010. He concluded that one of Skype's key assets - its peer-to-peer technology - was a mismatch for Google, which worked on the newer paradigm of cloud computing. When some Google executives heard that eBay was selling Skype, they jumped on the opportunity and began negotiating.Īs Chan helped with due diligence, even going to Europe to see Skype firsthand, he became convinced that the purchase was a bad idea for Google. It was Google's revamp of Grand Central, which Chan had snared in an acquisition the year before. In 2009 a brilliant product manager named Wesley Chan was in charge of Google Voice, which was still in development. All the geniuses who ripped the investors who bought Skype from eBay in 2009 don't look so smart now.īut I will recount a bit of history that readers of " In the Plex" already know: It was almost Google who owned Skype. It's too soon to make a pronouncement on whether the purchase is an idiot move, a brilliant one or just something in between. ( WIRED) - So Microsoft is buying Skype for $8.5 billion, its biggest deal ever.
Skype's key assets - its peer-to-peer technology - was a mismatch for GoogleĮditor's note: Steven Levy is the author of "In the Plex," a new book about Google's history.
It was almost Google who owned Skype, but the deal fell through.
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