Microsoft's acquisition of Skype is headline grabbing bombastry gone mad

Microsoft is so desperate to get a grip on the consumer market that it has just chucked out $8.5bn (£5.2bn) on a company that struggles to make a profit. Whatever Microsoft does with Skype, I can't see it succeeding.

Mobile phone operators absolutely hate Skype. I've been witness to mobile operators throwing the metaphorical muck at Skype simply because they know how much of a threat it is.

Skype is a peer-to-peer service that leeches bandwidth when it isn't being used to run the service. While this is fine on a PC, on a mobile phone it is an absolute nightmare. If Microsoft intends to add Skype to the Windows Phone 7 package then it won't take long for the proverbial to hit the whatnot.

If I were a T-Mobile or an Orange or an O2, I would be less than impressed if Microsoft started putting a service on handsets that not only stopped people using my network for calls but also tried to steal my bandwidth and data. The perceived threat posed by Skype to mobile phone operators will become a major issue as a result of this partnership.

In its current state, Skype is seemingly impossible to make money from - or ‘monetise', to use a sinful word. Worldwide, 663 million people use Skype and just 8.8 million of them pay to do so. Since its inception eight years ago, Skype has never managed to turn a profit.

In 2010 it had a turnover of $859.8m (£525m), making a loss of $7m (£4.3m). eBay thought there was money to be made from Skype when it spent around $2.6bn (£1.6bn) on the company in 2005 but in 2009 eBay sold Skype on to private investors for $2.75bn (£1.68bn) having done little with it in the meantime.

Peer-to-peer services are notoriously difficult to squeeze a profit out of (Napster and Kazaa to name just two), so what will make Skype any different? Microsoft, of course, has plenty of products and services to hang Skype onto and bundle it with, but getting value from it, history tells us, won't be a simple task.

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer has always been one for 'headlines' and for energetic bombastry and this deal with Skype has certainly succeeded in grabbing the headlines. It's now up to Microsoft and Ballmer to prove that Skype can work as part of Microsoft.