The software giant seems to be getting a step closer to its planned acquisition of Skype. There are even a few positioning moves which are being made for the embedded space, while working with Nitobi on an HTML5 framework for its Windows Phone platform. That is a giant multitasking its tasks. Tomorrow the Build conference kicks off, and Microsoft already has a busy outing on its hands.
Talking first about the biggest of all issues for Microsoft currently, which is Skype acquisition. The EU mergers and aquisitions listings has noted a deadline of ‘October 7’ for this acquisition. But if one is of the thought, that the finalization of the deal could be done on or before October 7, unfortunately this would not happen as “Voice On The Web” noted in a related post. The European antitrust watchers might just OK the deal with a few conditions applied, as they had announced that there is still scope for further investigation to take place or the approval can be denied too. The approval for the $8.5 billion deal had come from the US regulators in June.
Detailing about the head switch for the matter, a spokesperson said that Gurdeep Singh Pall, who was earlier the head of Lync, has now been switched for Derek Burney, while Gurdeep still is a Corporate Vice President, who had a dedicated position to “working on Skype strategy”. This would mean that for its Lync unified-communications product, Corporate Vice President Derek Burney would handle the managerial responsibility.
For its Embedded Systems division, Microsoft is honing the way its positioned. Last week, it was said by the company officials that Redmond was in process of developing “Pontecchio”, which is a code-name for an advanced machine-to-machine (M2M) connection manager. This has been designed in a way to let streamlining the way devices get connected to network services, so that the data streams become more efficient and predictable. Microsoft even had details on STB synergies for which it had noted that the team would be leveraging the company’s security in the last week’s press release. Additionally, there is investment flowing out of Microsoft to ensure security and identity-management technologies, so that all the data streams generated by embedded devices could well be operated with on-premise, public and private cloud services seamlessly.
Talking about Nitobi, it would be releasing PhoneGap HTML5 development framework for Windows Phone. Windows Phone programmers already have had the availability to the beta version of Nitobi’s open-source HTML5 development framework. The availability of this was made last week. However, Microsoft is not alone in the race for PhoneGap backer, as before Microsoft, its rivals such as Adobe and Salesforce have already worked on doing mobile-development work which involved Nitobi’s framework.
The Sync Framework coverage even has been extended by Microsoft to other non-Windows platforms. The new extension has been for non-Microsoft platforms such as iPhone, Android, and Blackberry apart from its warehouse products such as Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, and Windows Mobile. This new toolkit has been launched of late for Sync Framework 2.1, which adds support for a number of offline clients.
Seems like the busy week might just have a number more after tomorrow’s Build Conference.