Microsoft has already gotten underway with their plans to close the Skype Sweden subsidiary of Skype in Stockholm, where more than 120 people who are employed there will soon become unemployed because of this move.
It has been said that the decision to close this particular office has been a hard one to make. One report states that the company would like to lessen its geographical footprint and make use of a different location that will allow for better collaborations as well as improving engineering efficiency.
Founded in 2003 by Dane Janus Friis and Swede Niklas Zennstrom, Skype became a Microsoft entity in 2011 when it was purchased for nearly nine billion dollars. With new features such as a queue for calls, analytics for business calls and an auto attendant, there is little thought that the web-based program is lacking in forward-moving ideology in the rest of the world. Shares are even up by .29%.
Skype confirms that Microsoft has initiated talks with the unions to close the Stockholm office, however, the company has not revealed any further intentions. It does not seem likely that the reason behind the decision to close is based on economic situations, as the Stockholm office has seen recent revenues of more than 250 million dollars per year.
In light of this information, it is rumored that there might be a relocation of this office, however, that claim has been neither confirmed nor negated.
In stark contrast to the idea of closing one of its offices, Skype has made announcements recently about corporate collaborations that are expected to take off very shortly. This correlates with Amazon’s announcements in February of the launching of their new communication service called Chime. Skype is already on board with their own version of AWS, with a fresh new battle face for the impending engineering changes that will need to be made.
Not only is Chime going up again Google’s cloud based features such as Docs and Drive, as well as Hangouts, but it has caused Microsoft to give a hard push to Skype as the VoIP platform for business choices, even implementing it into Office 365. While Office is certainly a very popular business franchise, it is still cloudy as to how popular the Skype feature implementation will be taken and how many businesses will make use of the new technology.
Only time will tell.
