Q: How do you make Skype more of an everyday experience?Ī: It needs to become more seamless, and, quite candidly, easier to use on mobile smartphones. Finally, there's always been a sort of disruptive innovation culture that we've certainly had within Skype but you also see that very, very strongly represented within Microsoft. And there is definitely a strong belief system, certainly at my level and Steve (Ballmer's) level, that communications is a fundamental human need that crosses over into a lot of things. There's a definite software culture that runs deep across both organizations. Q: What works with Microsoft that maybe didn't work with eBay and some previous owners of Skype?Ī: In many ways we're quite similar. We've been consistently growing somewhere around 40% year on year, and that's pretty dramatic when you consider the base is going up. There's a huge set of great assets that we can leverage within the Microsoft family to accelerate that vision to get to a billion people.Ī: 254 million monthly active users.

And we set our goal to get to not just hundreds of millions but billions of users, and change it from an experience that wasn't just an appointment to talk like we're doing now but became an everyday sharing experience. We think we can change the way people communicate across multiple platforms - on your PC, the mobile phone, in your living room. Skype has always been much more than just a way of doing low-cost calling. Q: How is the marriage going with Microsoft?Ī: Very well.

Baig recently talked withTony Bates, president of the Skype Division, aboutSkype's direction.Edited for space and clarity. Before landing at Microsoft, the company was founded in 2003, and eventually acquired by eBay.USA TODAY's Edward C. To some regular users, 'skyping' has become a verb. It's been almost a year since since Microsoft completed its $8.5 billion acquisition of Internet calling firm Skype, used by consumers and businesses globally to make cheap calls and calls over video.

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