I’ve been busy with the 20 odd things I need to do on a daily basis at MWC and missed out on MSFTs acquisition of Danger. There are some interesting aspects of this acquisition, 1) The entertainment group (xbox) was the business unit that did the buying, not the mobile division, 2) the amount of the buyout was not mentioned.
Here’s my take on the buyout. There are two paths that MSFT can take with Danger. 1) morph the Hiptop to a gaming platform so that it competes with the Nintendo DS, PSP, and NGAGE. 2) leverage the back end sync service of Danger so that MSFT can compete with Apple and get a recurring revenue from unlimited service plans.
Danger as a gaming platform is hard to swallow, as a messaging platform it dominates any service/device on the market today, even blackberry. If MSFT can come up with a hosted service that includes activesync, exchange and integration in to the Live services, they may have a chance to compete with Apple.
The problem here is how the whole vision and integration schemes are being drafted. MSFT has done alot of shopping lately and I really don’t see how all these services play into a master plan. Verisign did the same over the last decade and they were left with a bunch of services that didn’t integrate with each other or neither did they every bother to come up with a plan. Now, Verisign has put that telecom division up for sale.
An even sadder thought is that MSFT will bury Danger and a once good product will never be heard of again, it wouldn’t be the first time MSFT did that.
I feel like its Deja Vu all over again with MSFT.
