Microsoft poised to make biggest ever buy – Skype

Eh?

How does a *web*-focused strategy merge with a P2P video-conferencing software?

And I think you need to look up how Azure works, particularly the compatibility and languages and underlying server structure (i.e. buy a few thousand MS Server licenses and we'll let you have your "own" Azure cloud - targeted at Dell, HP, etc.).

I wouldn't call Bing "actively reaching out" so much as "it's there and it'll probably work". By designing something to work for the vast majority of Windows users, the chances are it'll work for the other OS users too without hassle - I think that *ACTIVELY* reaching out is stretching the truth to its absolute limit.

And anyone in the computer industry for more than a decade of so recognises certain patterns in MS's behaviour - patterns that *can* be used to predict future behaviour with a high success rate. It's nothing to do with MS-hate so much as recognising the same things happening over and over and over. Hell, most of us (myself included) are dependent on MS-deployed OS in order to make the majority of our living.

And past results have shown that just about *EVERYTHING* I've used from MS (especially the stuff that was bought up from others) eventually turns to shite. That's not a comment on how much I hate MS, but a simple observation. Hotmail? Turned to shite. And I was a paying customer for years. They bought professional backup software to stick into Windows, it turned into shite. WebTV. MechWarrior series. Visio. Rare. Lionhead Studios. Sysinternals. DesktopStandard. Multimap (now part of Bing but I haven't used it since around the time MS took over, and I didn't even know it WAS MS until I just read it). Basically everything that has been bought by MS that I used turned to shite within a year or two of acquisition (some almost immediately). And it wasn't that their functionalities were moved into MS and made the relevant MS products "better" - far from it. Most of the time they were quietly left to die, or merged in a crippled way. Hell, a lot of the MS operating system is nothing more than acquired software with its best functionalities destroyed rather than enhanced by being part of the default OS install (ntbackup can't even ATTEMPT a restore from anything other than the EXACT version of ntbackup you used to backup - sometimes down to the hotfix).

If the rumours are true, then Skype users are in for a rough ride, whether or not they hate MS and want to use Linux versions. It's just the way history has always gone with MS. I'm a Skype user - at the moment there's no reason to ditch (mainly because it's only a rumour at this point) but this will make me look for alternatives NOW (which I may or may not end up using) whereas if Company X had taken it over, I probably wouldn't bother until I saw problems.

I closed my hotmail account the day ms bought them

You expect some kind of logic, fair competition from MS, seeing Skype as a service to make money from on all platforms. It isn't like that.

When they acquired Hotmail, I childishly (!) mailed hotmail support department to ask how to cancel my acccount. They said not logging in for a certain period is enough.

I proved to be right when they let it fail at least 4 times just because they couldn't stand to fact that it runs on FreeBSD UNIX and tried to switch it to their unscalable joke NT.

I was again proved right when people daring to use other browsers than IE started to live problems.

MS didn't have their "Apple" wakening up or IBM and they sure act like MS. The devices accessing Skype (near all) exist thanks to qt. The multiplatform (down to Symbian) exist thanks to qt. It is sort of documented API minus the network so anything (including adium/pidgin) can integrate with it. There isn't a single part of Skype that works best with Windows or IE. It is all standards.

If you expect MS not to change anything above, you better start with reading Halloween docs right on The Register. It is the same MS, they didn't change, they didn't need to change... Yet.

Au Contraire, Mon Ami

Not at all, in fact you're 6 minutes late.

Makes sense for MS

I was thinking the opposite. This makes sense for MS. Practically everyone else uses SIP for VOIP (or supports it). Yet with Skype, it's a proprietry "standard" or nothing.

(Hold the press, I can now pay Skype a monthly fee to get their "free" calls into my SIP VOIP exchange...)

I think it's your office

All the machines in my office have Skype installed and they never go down with malware. Ergo, it's your office.

Or it might be that almost all my machines have Linux installed. ;-)

Get a SIP account

SIP is standard, even built into handsets themselves (Nokia etc.) and anything can access it.

Or, if you say "friends", get access to google talk. It is built on XMPP (Jabber) which is another industry/business standard. Google documents it too.

Linux already lags

The Linux client is already behind the Windows one by a long way, but that's a good thing! The Linux users still get a simple, unbloated client that sits there and does as it's told. The Windows client has become a monster, and the Mac client is no better. I can't think of any features I've ever needed to use that weren't in the Linux version, so I say let it stay that way, and leave the bloat out.

Call a MSN User (non tech one)

On Symbian Nimbuzz, we can also "call" MSN people and nobody I tried answered. One even went offline.

Thing is, they didn't even know such functionality exists (seen the win monster lately?) and they thought... It as kind of a fake/virus thing! When I asked the guy why he went offline, he talked about some virus posing as caller!