Microsoft Wants Skype For $8 billion! Update: Confirmed.

Microsoft, Google and Facebook are all after Skype - the Estonia based company founded by two young software developers Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis who were behind the popular file sharing service Kazaa. Skype was quickly adopted by the techies and soon made its entry into corporate offices and desktops as it began offering free computer to computer calls over Internet. Skype's popularity shot up after they introduced very cheap computer to phone calling at International destinations. Skype currently has over 650 million registered users and over 8 million paying customers. All three big companies, MS, Goog & FB don't have the capability to match the success of Skype and the easiest thing for them to gain control over Skype is to buy it. No doubt, Microsoft has big piles of cash it can shell out to acquire anything they want. The latest rumor is that Microsoft is willing to pay $8billion to acquire Skype.

#-Link-Snipped-#first reported the news that Microsoft is willing to spend about 7-8 billion dollars to buy Skype. WSJ #-Link-Snipped-# that the deal could be announced as early as Tuesday. The question is, why is Microsoft willing to pay such a huge amount? Well, the foremost reason is that Skype's Internet audio & video calling technology rivals directly with CISCO and Google - which is Microsoft's #1 enemy in the online world. It will also introduce Microsoft to the LTE based network for 4G operations and also compete with Google Voice & Apple Facetime.

In this deal, the biggest winners would be the founders, who have 14% stake and eBay, which has 30% stake in it. The investors have about 56% stake in the company and they'll take huge sums home with this deal.

Your take on this deal?

Update: It's official. See the #-Link-Snipped-#.