Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) Now Acquires the Original Groove

Microsoft Campus
A building on the Microsoft Headquarters campus is pictured July 17, 2014 in Redmond, Washington. (Stephen Brashear/Getty Images)

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has now bought the original Groove Company. Groove is the company that built the Groove Smart Music player, an application that has been available on iOS and android for a considerable length of time now. In an announcement, Microsoft said that it is now the new owner of the application. The company also said that it had decided to acquire the domain name that is associated with the Groove applications.

The team behind the music applications also confirmed that the app as well as the domain name, had been fully acquired by Microsoft. Currently, the domain name, groovemusicapp.com is now redirecting to the Microsoft’s very own music service site.

However, the founders of the original Groove have declined to reveal the amount of money that Microsoft paid them to acquire their company. In an e-mail message, they said that they were not ready to disclose the amount of money that Microsoft had paid them in as part of the acquisition deal.

This recent move by the Windows maker is a culmination of a long process that has been characterized by confusion. Back in 2015, Microsoft made the announcement that it had started a new music service that would be called Groove Music Service. At that time, many observers said that the use of the name Groove by the company for its new service was inspired by the name of the small company that Microsoft had acquired back in 2005.

In 2005, The software giant had acquired a small company called Groove Networks. Therefore, the choice of the name for its new service later in 2015 as Groove Music Service was not seen as a strange occurrence.

However, the problem was that the name Groove was already in use. When Microsoft even went ahead and renamed its Xbox as Groove Music, it was clear that the use of the name Groove was causing a lot of confusion. At that time, the company that was behind the development of the Groove Smart Music Player did not offer any comments on how Microsoft was using the name for its own services.

Now, it appears that Microsoft has moved to end the confusion by officially bringing Groove Smart Music Player application together with its domain name under its own fold. Although this has been lauded as a positive step, it has been argued that Microsoft took a very long time to do this. Many believe that the company would have acquired Groove Smart Music player app and its domain name a long time ago.