Microsoft Goes All In with Skype
Mergers and acquisitions are interesting to keep track of, especially when it comes to how merged and acquired brands perform a few years down the line. One such high visibility acquisition that we are all aware of is the Microsoft and Skype deal.
Although the year after the acquisition was a quiet period to the external world, there has been a lot of news about this deal in the last six months—starting with the plan to retire Microsoft Messenger early this year and recent confirmation that March 15, 2013, will be the official end of the Messenger era.
Skype then becomes Microsoft’s official solution for instant messaging and audio-visual communications. It is always exciting to see such a huge name brand—Messenger at its peak in 2010 had a global user base of 300 million—retired to pave the way for the acquired brand to be established in the marketplace in hopes of winning more users and beating out competitors.
Behind the scenes though, it is obviously going to be a laborious process to prepare for the transition—from market analysis to deciding on user base, target markets (Messenger will be discontinued globally except for mainland China), time to transition, how much lead time is to be given, what notifications to send out, what beta and internal testing needs to be done to ensure quality is not at risk, etc.
From an external perspective, let's look at some of what might have happened internally, especially from a quality standpoint in preparation for the transition:
Migration testing needs to be a highly-planned effort especially when the scale of operations is large. In addition to core testing for the migration implementation, testers typically play a significant role in working on which areas or features to migrate from a technical feasibility and usability angle.
For example, Skype has not been fully integrated into Windows Phone 8 OS and is being made available as a downloadable application but with much tighter integration than other downloadable applications. Such decisions have important impact from business and engineering perspectives, and looping in test to validate them is a wise move.
Ample time must be set aside for betas to ensure the required feature integrations are in place, performance is not impacted, and overall product acceptance is desirable.
Official forums and non-official forums have been set up to provide FAQs and associated help information to make the transition as seamless as possible. Monitoring them with representation across disciplines to ensure the right messaging happens and the required help is provided to the user community is critical.
We’ll have to wait to see how the market accepts this transition, but kudos to Microsoft for making the move and continuing to work on integrating Skype into their enterprise solutions, such as Office and SharePoint as well.
