Skype Press Conference: Steve Ballmer and Tony Bates

Remarks by Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, and Tony Bates, CEO of Skype
May 10, 2011
San Francisco, California

FRANK SHAW: Good morning. I’m Frank Shaw, head of Communications for Microsoft. Thanks for coming by today. We heard there wasn’t much going on today. So, we wanted to make sure you had some news to cover. In just a minute, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Skype CEO Tony Bates will talk about our news from earlier this morning, and then I’ll moderate a short Q&A.

Just a reminder, no flash photography. Please limit photos to the first few minutes of the presentation.

Now, for the fun stuff. During this conference, we will be making statements that are forward-looking. Statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risk and uncertainties. Actual results could materially differ because of factors discussed in today’s press release, and the comments made during this press conference, and the risk factor section of our Form 10-K, Form 10-Q, and other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statement.

Now, please welcome Steve Ballmer and Tony Bates.

STEVE BALLMER: Thanks everybody for coming today. It’s a real pleasure to have a chance, Tony will be up in a minute, we thought we’d have a chance first to greet you together.

Today is a big day for Microsoft, and Skype, as well as consumers and businesses around the world. By bringing together the best of Microsoft, and the best of Skype, we will empower people around the world with new technologies that should bring them closer together. In a sense, if that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s at the core of who we are at Microsoft. We create technology that makes life better for billions of people, and millions of companies around the globe. We’re making life better by providing tools that help people to learn, to analyze, to take action, as well as to enjoy, and to socialize.

At Microsoft, we’re doing this through a number of products, products like our Office product, which enables users to consume information, to create and to communicate; Bing, which moves beyond serving up lists of information and tries to help people analyze the information, and actually make decisions and take action; Xbox, Xbox LIVE, and Kinect, creating tools for an enjoyable and social experience in the living room and online.

Communications, though, is perhaps the most fundamental area in which technology can be transformative. Communications is changing rapidly, and there are plenty of opportunities ahead. We’ll move beyond email and text to rich experiences in the future, talking to friends and colleagues around the world will be as seamless as talking to them across a kitchen table or a conference room.

We dream about building experiences that aren’t limited by distance or device. We dream about how to build experiences where people can enjoy and connect with the people and groups of people most important to them in the ways that are most natural. Think about everyday experiences, and how they can become more connected, like attending a college lecture, joining a PTA meeting, preserving memories from a family reunion, or simply having meetings with groups of colleagues. All of these experiences will be enhanced with online technology to make them richer and better, whether you’re there in person, or you need to participate remotely.

At Microsoft, we see enormous opportunity that brings together what people want — data, voice, video, IM, all on a single screen — whether it’s a smart phone, a PC, a slate, or the TV. Microsoft and Skype together will define this future and what it really, really looks like. Anytime, I would say, people around the planet talk about communications, they talk about Skype. The Skype brand has become a verb, nearly synonymous with video and voice communications. Clearly, Skype has built an innovative product with global scale, and the number of Skype users is rapidly accelerating, which really was exciting to me. There are 170 million connected Skype users, growth of 40 percent year over year. That number is growing by 600,000 new registrations every day.

And these are very engaged users. Skype users use over 207 billion calling minutes in 2010 alone. In February Skype had about 30 million concurrent users on the service, which is really phenomenal. I had a Skype yesterday with Tony Bates, and I happened to notice there were 25 million concurrent users at the time, just to give you kind of a sense.

These users love the video chat capability and it’s exploding. It now represents more than 40 percent of all Skype use.

With that kind of growth engagement, Skype has developed multiple revenue streams, and overall revenue has grown 20 percent year-over-year, and I think represents a very significant go-forward opportunity. In case it’s not clear, I’m excited about the Skype business. Microsoft has a strong history with Skype. We’re familiar with them, based upon the Skype client work on Windows, and we’ve been talking for a while about other important partnership opportunities, including partnering in the advertising area.

Based on Skype’s great market position and innovative technology though, it became clear to use that we had the opportunity to do even more together as a single company in a way that would be innovative and beneficial to customers, as well as both companies. So, we made an unsolicited offer to acquire Skype, to Silver Lake. We finalized price in mid-April, and we signed the deal last night.

Tony Bates, the current CEO of Skype, and soon to be president of the Microsoft Skype division, and I had a chance this morning to talk to Skype employees around the world, but particularly in Europe where Skype has a strong base of operations and developments, and product management and other things.

We did that very early this morning, in order to be able to reach the folks in Tallinn, in Estonia, who are ten time zones difference before they went home today, and we’ll be going down to visit with Skype employees in Palo Alto later on today. Tony and I are actually heading to Europe for the weekend to meet with employees in a number of locations. Skype is a great business, and the heart of that business is the great people, and I certainly am looking forward to spending time with a broader group of employees over the next few days, building on the relationships we have with Tony and his leadership team.

In that context, I want to talk more specifically about the number and nature of the opportunities that we see ahead. First, and I’ve got to underscore this, we’re committed to the Skype user base. Today and into the future we want to continue to build and engage that base, as Skype is doing today. Once we complete the regulatory process, Skype will become a Microsoft division. Tony will join the leadership team reporting directly to me and running the Microsoft Skype division. Our vision is that products and services that Skype users know and love today will simply grow and be enhanced. Part of that commitment is to continue investing and supporting Skype on non-Microsoft client platforms.

The second area I want to talk about is the huge potential for us together to create new user experiences and market opportunities. We’re committed to optimizing Skype for the TV, with Xbox and Kinect, for the Windows Phone, and the Windows PC. The opportunity to think about and design software application and communications experience, and the hardware together is exciting for both companies.

At the same time, we want to extend the reach of Skype by connecting Skype users with users of our Outlook products, our Lync enterprise unified communications product, Xbox LIVE, and other opportunities like Messenger and Hotmail. Fundamentally, part of our strategy here is to build and grow the Skype brand, and we think that both of these activities have a chance to not only enhance customer value, but enhance the brand reputation of the Skype brand. We’re excited about the opportunities that we see in the consumer and the commercial area, but the one I’ll underscore just a little bit more is on the business, or commercial side.

For business we’ve had an incredible uptake of our Lync unified communications client. We’re committed and want to build on that success. As I said, the product is off to a fantastic start, and we have plans to enhance it, in addition to connecting it into the rest of the Skype customer base, which I think in and of itself will be viewed as a great value to our customers.

Through this acquisition, we also think that there will be a number of other new ways to work proactively and positively on the partnerships that we put in place with mobile operators around our Windows Phone. And that will be an area of focus as we get through the regulatory process.

So, if you’re a user, a consumer, how does this news really impact you? Let me kind of show you a little bit of a picture. We all know that people have things that they do at work, and people have things that they do at home. And they have devices that they use that span both their work and personal lives. What we want to do is to bring tools that help you communicate to everybody in your life, no matter which persona you’re in and how you want to work. Outlook is such a tool.

You can manage all of your electronic mail communications, and calendar, your work life, personal life in Outlook. In a sense, what you could say here is that Skype joins in really quite naturally. It connects both work and home. And it fits into the context of the way that people live. It enables communication across all of people’s lives, and all of their devices.

What I’d like to do now, to talk more about Skype, and to give a point of view from Skype on the deal, is to introduce, as I said, the future president of the Microsoft Skype Division, and current Skype CEO, Tony Bates.

Tony. (Applause.)

TONY BATES: Thank you. This is really a big day for Skype. I think it’s big day for our users, first and foremost, it’s a big day for our community, and this incredible network effect, this global network that we have today, but most importantly it’s a big day for all our Skype employees. We’re incredibly excited about the opportunity, as you laid out there, Steve, and what I want to do is I want to share a little bit of perspective about what Skype really is today, and where it’s come.

If you think about the history and the culture of Skype, it was founded in 2003, and it was founded around very disruptive and innovative software, very similar to the founding DNA of Microsoft in actual fact. And Skype has really grown from a sort of single platform capability into multi-client, multi-capabilities, across many different devices, across many different geographies, moving from voice and text to rich video.

What that really allows us to do as a key set of assets, if you think about the core of what Skype is today, is be able to create a very, very engaged user base. Steve shared with you some of the incredible numbers. But we’re in a very special place in the industry. Not only are we a verb, it’s exciting to be used in that context, people say can I Skype you, and the first thing they think about is voice or video on a global basis. We’re also part of a very exclusive club. I like to think of it as the 100-100 club. We have over 100 million users who use us each and every month, 170 at last count. But, we also have a very, very engaged user base. A user base on average uses 100 minutes per user, per month. A user, because we create great experiences, we like to think of it as a universal service, that’s useful in terms of every day life, in terms of business, and creates incredible moments, in terms of the way people used it.

There are incredible use cases, people that are in remote locations who will use it to see their baby being born, in very difficult-to-reach locations around the world where someone might be in the service, many, many of these stories. That engaged user base has taken us on a very fast growth trajectory, and creates a tremendous amount of monetization opportunities.

Skype is focused on three key opportunities. The first is our core communications business, our core communications service, which has been around really since the start, which started with voice and has moved to video. On top of that, we layer new premium subscription packages, new ways of thinking about the way that people communicate, not only in real-time, but also in non real-time. That’s a key part of, I think, the shared vision. When we talk about magical moments, sharing things together in a rich and expressive way, that’s a key lever of Skype’s strategy.

Also, when you have such a larger user base, and such an engaged base, we have an opportunity to change the way that we think about advertising, and we launched into that, and that’s a key part of our monetization.

So, when we start to think about those combined with the innovation we put in technology, we believe we have a very, very strong set of key core assets. When we think about a partnership with Microsoft, it can only get accelerated around some of the ideas that Steve talked about.

We also have a very fundamentally sound business. We wouldn’t be here today if Steve didn’t believe that, if Microsoft didn’t believe it. We’re profitable. We’ve been growing at a great rate, and we’ve got the foundation to build off that and keep growing the core assets. But, I think what’s more important for us, as we think about where we were going as a company and how this fits, we’re really at the beginning of the intersection of what we think are the three key trends that we really focus on as a company.

We’ve started to focus very heavily into the mobile space, and we talked a little bit already about some of the areas we can work together. Mobile is clearly moving to be a rich communications capability above and beyond just voice. We introduced two-way video recently in terms of our iPhone products, and our Android products, and we’ll work together with Microsoft to keep enhancing and enriching those. And you can see just how much video is going to dominate the traffic as we look for the next few years.

It’s one of the fastest growing parts of the industry, and Skype is well-positioned. We’ve also focused very, very heavily on video. Video is in our DNA. It’s in the technology that we produce. It’s in the way that we think about communications. Over 40 percent of all of the traffic that Skype delivers today is already video. Video ads, as I talked about, is one of the biggest opportunities we see moving forward, and we’re just at the beginning of that in the U.S., less than 5 percent of the market is there today.

Video itself, we think, as an overall market for both advertising and for rich communications around collaboration, and finding ways to create that engaged user base is going to be one of the fastest growing areas of the market. We estimate 45 percent growth just in video-based ads over the compound annual growth rate in the next few years.

And last but not least, when we think about Skype, Skype really is that inner circle, it’s that inner social experience. Most people that use Skype have a very select set of friends, or business associates, the eight to ten folks they talk to every day. That is really the intersection that we see. So, Skype is focused on mobile, it’s focused on video as core communications service, and then how that intersects with social is really, really exciting for us.

We really appreciate the fact that, Steve, you’ve put your faith in us. We think there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity as we look forward. We think this allows us to extend, not from hundreds of millions, to literally billions. We believe that this is a platform, and a set of services that could reach everyone on the planet. The exciting opportunity is ahead of us in terms of the way that we can interact with the key assets of Microsoft, whether it’s Xbox LIVE, whether we start to talk about some of the end devices. The commitment from Microsoft to support multi-platform clients, whether that be Microsoft end point clients, or other end point clients, is absolutely critical, and was one of the key decisions, and the focus on the brand.

So, we couldn’t be more excited, Steve, and with that I’ll turn it back to you.

STEVE BALLMER: One last aspect we want to make sure we get to before we wrap up is the financial aspects of the deal, and the ramifications for Microsoft, and to walk you all through that, please welcome Peter Klein, the Chief Financial Officer of Microsoft.

Peter.

PETER KLEIN: Thanks, Steve.

Any time you do an acquisition, ideally you’re looking for a company that has a strong and growing business, and has a natural strategic fit for what we’re doing. And I think Steve and Tony have done a great job describing how this transaction has those characteristics.

So, I want to provide a little more color from a financial perspective. Skype is a strong and growing business. Steve talked a little bit about the growth. Revenue last year was $860 million growing 20 percent year over year, EBDA was $264 million growing 40 percent. So, you can see the business has operating leverage. EBDA margins have grown from 20 percent to 31 percent over a three-year period to 2010. So, you’ve got a strong growing business with an engaged user base, and great technology. You’ve got operating leverage. And, in addition to that, and you heard Tony talk about this, there is new revenue streams and new growth opportunities that we’re just scratching the surface on. So, you’ve got a strong foundation, and new growth opportunities. So, a very strong business that we’re acquiring.

Obviously, we think the combination of these companies accelerates what each of us is doing to provide value for both business and consumer customers across all devices. We’ve been investing in real-time communications, most notably with our Lync product, which we released last year, and has great market momentum. Last quarter, it grew over 30 percent. Bringing these two products together, and these two companies together will really accelerate what we can offer business customers.

Similarly for consumers, bringing the consumer services that we both bring, and the set of assets that we have, and the engaged user base, obviously scales distribution and drives synergy for our business.

Of course, we’ll have compelling and differentiated experiences across all devices, whether those are big screens in your living room, like TV, if those are small screens like mobile devices that you take with you on the go, or PCs and other devices. So, really compelling opportunity to build on the strength of both companies, and accelerate what we’re doing.

A few details, we’re paying total consideration of $8.5 billion, that is all in cash. In fact, we will be using overseas cash to make this transaction. Given the strength of the business, and the fact that we’re using cash, we expect that this will be accretive, excluding non-cash amortization charges immediately, and we hope to secure all necessary regulatory approvals during the remainder of this calendar year. Obviously pending the regulatory process, it’s difficult to make specific product roadmap disclosures, and as we get closer to approval and closing, we’ll have more to share on the product and implementation plan.

So, that is some of the details, and with that I’ll turn it back over to Steve.

STEVE BALLMER: I just want to wrap with a couple of words about Microsoft before we take questions. I’ve been at Microsoft a long time at this stage, 31 years, the company is about 36 years old, and a couple of things I would highlight. No. 1, we’re a super-ambitious company. We are irrepressible in moving forward, and pursuing new things. We’ve been consistently focused on empowering consumers and businesses to do more with technology. This Skype acquisition is entirely consistent with our ambitious forward-looking, irrepressible nature.

Sometimes we build things ourselves, as we’ve done with Bing and Kinect, or we’ll partner and form an alliance to seize the moment, and at other times we’ll make an acquisition, as we’re announcing today, one that placed our strengths, and is much more than the sum of its parts.

This is a big day for Skype, and this is a big day for Microsoft. We’re adding a new division, and a new promise to our customers. The promise of universal next generation communications. Microsoft and Skype together will bring together hundreds of millions or, as Tony said, billions of consumers and empower them to communicate in new and interesting ways. It’s core to our mission, it’s core to our technology direction.

And with that, I would like to wrap up, and we’ll open for your questions. Tony is going to join me back on stage. Peter is available. The three of us will welcome your questions, and I think Frank Shaw will moderate.

FRANK SHAW: We have time for a couple of questions.

QUESTION: What are the metrics that you’re going to look at that will help you determine whether or not this is a successful deal as you go forward.

STEVE BALLMER: Well, I’m quite sure we’re going to be successful with something this fundamental to kind of our essence, which is the power of communications. From a classic approach, obviously we care a lot about users, and engagement. We care a lot about revenue, and operating income, and we care a lot about innovation, because innovation and the strength of the team will underpin all of the sort of customer adoption and financial metrics. So, it’s, let me say, fairly classic, shall we say, in a business sense.

FRANK SHAW: OK, thanks.

A question here.

QUESTION: (Off mike)  Reuters. Could you provide some more color on the deal? Obviously, Skype has been around for a while, and I wanted to ask you when you decided that Skype would be right for Microsoft, and how the process went on from there?

STEVE BALLMER: Obviously, we’ve known Skype for quite a while. We know the company. It’s a company that’s actually even been sold before, so it’s not the first time the industry, let me say, has engaged in the dialogue. In this particular case, we were in a set of partnership discussions, and our team, including me, we all got excited about it. Skype was on a path to IPO, and we said, hey, we think at least from our perspective, it would be better if we owned this company, so we did make an unsolicited offer. Tony didn’t look for it. The ownership group led by Silver Lake didn’t look for it. We just decided something that we thought made sense for us, and that was kind of about the beginning of April, and we’ve proceeded to sign the definitive agreement last night.

FRANK SHAW: OK, right there.

QUESTION: Ryan Lawler from GigaOm.

Just a quick question, you had touched on some new revenue opportunities, can you provide a little more color about ads, and that type of thing?

TONY BATES: Yes, Peter said it well. We’re just scratching the surface of that. We just started in ads. We have the ability right now within the new Windows client to put a home page, think of it like a home page takeover type ad. There will be a number of other things, obviously, we can’t talk about future roadmaps, but we think advertising is a very powerful monetization stream for us.

If you think about the size of our user base, it’s just a natural extension for that. We want to approach the market, really, around a rich media approach, though, so if you see the ad it’s a very rich experience. You can click on the ad. That can pop out. You can see a piece of animated rich media with advertising. So, we really think that it fits the user base of where we’ve been moving, which is to really have this immersive experience. So, we’re going to stay true to that around the Skype brand, but given the size of our base, and the amount of that today in terms of the free products that we give, it seems like a natural monetization extension.

STEVE BALLMER: Advertising is one of the areas we’ve been talking about for partnerships since we obviously have an advertising sales force, and so it is an area that even without acquisition has been interesting for partnership.

FRANK SHAW: OK, right over here.

QUESTION: (Off mike)  Fortune.

Two quick questions. Were you being courted by others pre-IPO, if you can answer that, and also, overseas cash, what are the benefits of doing it that way?

TONY BATES: I’ll take the first tone. We were very focused on our IPO. We had an unsolicited offer, we made an evaluation, and last night we signed the agreement.

STEVE BALLMER: In terms of overseas cash, this is a Luxembourg company that we’re acquiring, so we’ll use cash. I think it’s kind of well understood that we have cash in the U.S. and in various places overseas. From a shareholder perspective and balance sheet perspective, that does matter to some extent and has some benefits, but it’s also quite appropriate, given that this is a Luxemburg company, in fact.

FRANK SHAW: OK. A question back there?

QUESTION: I use Skype, and I think it’s wonderful, but I think I’m average in that I don’t know how this makes my life easier. For the working moms who might be like me, or working dads, how does this make my life easier with your purchase, will it now make it even easier to log on if you can speak to the grandmas out there?

STEVE BALLMER: Well, we absolutely love Skype and what it is today, so let’s start by saying, that’s a pretty great experience and we’re excited about it. But, let me take just a couple of things. I think it’s pretty obvious today that not everybody is doing kind of video participation from their phone. That’s an opportunity where there are lots of things that can be done, both at Skype and at Microsoft with our phone partners and also cross-device.

Take Kinect, I mean a great scenario I still think is room-size, you want somebody who is not present to be able to fully participate in a family event, and you think about what we’ve done with Kinect, and kind of giving you almost like a home video conferencing system, if you will, but one that costs just a few hundred bucks. I think there’s a lot of opportunities to innovate. So, that’s on the device side.

In terms of the connecting up the customer bases, people do have one life, and the ability to call somebody from, or communicate with somebody, participate in a meeting with people who work in your business, and who don’t work in your business, who are in your PTA, but who you haven’t met before. We want to stitch together the world and we have big customer bases that we can connect in a way that will add value to, I think, all members of the community.

TONY BATES: I’d say at Skype we think about the world of communication across three lines of modality, and we’ve touched on those. One clearly is the PC. And we’re very well established in that market, that’s where we started from. There’s a natural, obviously, alignment with Microsoft there.

The second one is clearly the mobile phone. People are more on the go all the time. Smartphones having richer, and better video capabilities, and two-way cameras. And the third is also the living room, quite candidly. I think it’s an area where we’d like it just to be easier. This is where actually a lot of folks do spend time at home, including the grandma, who would actually not necessarily have the smart phone. And Skype has already shown how we can take what we’ve built, and put that across a number of platforms. We already are on 50 million TVs, for example, today. But, really getting that to go to the next level, we need to actually broaden that and connect to other devices. So, that’s one piece.

I think the other piece, as Steve alluded to, connecting these various services or networks together is really going to enhance both I think the consumer experience, but also the business experience, because let’s face it, many of us are blending both of those on the go all the time. And having the ability to do that in an easier way is going to be, I think, very important for communications in general, and this is just a great fit for that.

STEVE BALLMER: And for the folks you talked about, I’ll give an example in my own life. I hustled, I broke my back in an hour of traffic, to make a meeting at my kid’s school. I got there and I wondered why I wasn’t participating electronically for the hour I had spent in the car, I think there is just a better way to do these things, whether they’re school meetings, PTA, family reunions, they’re just will be better ways and Skype and Microsoft will drive those.

FRANK SHAW: Let’s get the question right there.

QUESTION: So, I imagine there are a lot of people out there right now who are using Skype on other platforms like Android, and iOS, and you mentioned the importance of multi-platform. What can you say to reassure these people that the multi-platform approach of Skype will continue and that it won’t be neglected, since it’s now owned by a company that makes a competing platform?

STEVE BALLMER: Well, I said it, and I mean it. We will continue to support non-Microsoft platforms, because it’s fundamental to the value proposition of communications. Two, we’re one of the few companies actually who has a track record of doing this. You take a look at the work we’ve done over the years with Office, for example, on the Mac. If you even take a look at some of the great work we’ve done with applications, on top of Apple, other Apple devices. I think we have a track record of understanding our customers and the need to support our customers, as they want to travel in various places.

We obviously love Windows, and we love Windows Phone, and we love the Xbox, and we’re going to do a lot of work together to design these things and optimize the work that we do across the device, the operating system and the communications software, no question about it. But, fundamental to the value proposition of communications is being able to reach everybody, whether they happen to be on your device or not. And I think that, in fact, will be one of our competitive advantages, both for the Skype communications services, and in fact, for the devices as we move forward.

TONY BATES: I’d just add, I think fundamental to the Skype value prop, as Steve alluded to, is that, but fundamental to the deal is that commitment, and that’s where we have a shared vision alignment.

FRANK SHAW: OK, Peter.

QUESTION: Carriers have had a challenging relationship over the years with Skype, not knowing quite what to do with it. Right now, obviously, Apple and Android have a lot of momentum with carriers. How is this  is this really going to help you, how are the carriers feeling about it?

STEVE BALLMER: Well, certainly for particularly Windows Phone, but a variety of other things we do, but let’s say anchored in Windows Phone, the partnership and collaboration that we have today is fundamental and certainly it will be fundamental to getting Windows phone to the next level of marketplace acceptance and we’re absolutely committed to that. I’m encouraged by the good work Tony and his team has done already with a number of participants in the wireless industry to drive new value, and I think fundamentally I think everybody who is in the network business, the communications business understands that the key to business acceleration is innovation in new scenarios. And I think our opportunity to do that together has been enhanced. And we certainly will work with our operator partners, continue to work with them, fundamentally on the success of Windows Phones.

TONY BATES: Just from a Skype perspective, what we hear increasingly from carriers is exactly that, to differentiate the communication experience. It goes way beyond just one form. So, what Skype has offered is this rich text, audio to video, and we’ve had great success. We’ve had some strong partnership with mobile operators, and we think that can continue in this vein.

STEVE BALLMER: I’ve certainly already heard back this morning form some of our operator partners who have been enthusiastic and I’m sure we all have some work to do to also communicate clearly and continue to support the broad set of operator partners.

FRANK SHAW: OK. We’ll take one more question there, and then we’ll wrap it up.

QUESTION: While Skype is in the enterprise it hasn’t exactly competed head-to-head as much as you might like with, say, your old company Cisco and WebEx. How will this partnership bring Skype in as more of an enterprise class tool for these kinds of communications you’re talking about?

TONY BATES: Yes, I’ll maybe just outline Skype’s strategy. Skype, in terms of Skype for business, where we really have been focused is sort of extending our network reach in with our Kinect offering. And so that’s been the big primary focus, and again, we’re perhaps at the early stages of that strategy. I think just given some of the things that are outlined you can see that one, we can first connect, which is really important, the different communities, the business customer base that clearly is very strong within the Microsoft portfolio, and then we can see how we can actually take that to the next level over time.

STEVE BALLMER: Yes, we have a great offer today that’s been very rapidly adopted, starting with our Office Communications products, and Communicator, and now Lync, and the adoption has been swooping up. One of the key scenarios is that enterprises want a level of control, on the other hand the people want to talk to partners, vendors who live outside their four walls of their company, they want to talk to family and friends, and I think there’s a lot of value creation by building on what we have in place and are developing in the enterprise with some of eth things Skype is doing, not only with the consumer, but tying that together with what we’ve got in the enterprise with Lync.

FRANK SHAW: Great. Thank you very much for coming. This wraps up our press conference, and we’ll be available for any questions that come up later on. Thank you very much.

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