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Comment by pstack | Hacker News Reader

For 8.5 billion, you could hire a couple dozen of the highest class escorts forever and travel the world in a super-yacht with them for sixty years.

Or you could pay a ton of people that you hate the most a dollar per hit to punch themselves in the face for a year straight.

Or you could build your own Skype service from scratch and have about $8,499,500,000 left over to maintain and market it.

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Yeah, but how much would you have to spend to get 500 million users, many of which you already have credit card information for? Not saying this acquisition was necessarily worth the cost at all- but it wasn't just about the technology.

Pay each user who signs up and uses your service $10. You'd still have $3.5 billion in change.

This seems like a sustainable business plan :)

If only user acquisition costs were that low...

Where are these 500 million users? Do you mean the Skype user base? Skype has 170 million users. Of those, only 1% actually pay for the service. So you're probably paying for 1.7m people's credit card information and accounts. Or do you mean 500 million Microsoft users? (Not being an ass, I honestly wasn't clear which users who were referring to in the process here.)

From SFGate article about the acquisition: "Skype's huge user base- more than 660 million users, including more than 120 million active of 'connected' users." http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/05/12/...

The 500million user figure was from a big TechCrunch article from 2009. http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/21/skype-hits-521-million-user...

Again, I'm not trying to necessarily argue that this acquisition was worth it. But, there is more than technological value here. There is a huge user base here.

I like that somehow you did the escort math and came up with about 60 years of luxury travel.

escort quality is like a gas, it expands to fill the bank account available for it

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