Watching Skype Fall.

I have seen products taken over by marge companies, only to see them die a slow and painful death due to lost direction, bad leadership and sheer greed. First, you have Karelia Software's Watson (completely devoured by Sun Microsystems and outright plagiarised by Apple Computer as an inferior product) and then Konfabulator (left to languish by Yahoo!). Both products lost any opportunities to see great potential in the markets they were born in, all thanks to large companies acquiring, then neglecting the products they were supposedly interested in.

Now, there is yet another product—no, actually, an entire Web service—that is about to suffer the same fate due to corporate meddling: Skype.

Should this be allowed, given Microsoft's woeful performance in marketing and developing Windows Live? In a way, I'd like to see MSN die a quick death as a result of their acquisition of Skype; frankly, their Mac OS X client is woeful to say the least, and with some Windows-only features that make the Mac client next to impossible to use, it makes using MSN unattractive to the typical Mac user (who may want to meet up with their Windows-using friends).

However, Microsoft could just kill what Skype have spent all these years building—a reliable communications network that allows anybody with a Mac, Linux, Windows, Android or iOS gadget to communicate to the best of the hardware's ability. With Microsoft now meddling, and certainly with Windows-only interests in mind, this ubiquitous Internet messaging system is in direct threat of being dismantled.

Microsoft are only in this to do one of two things, if not both: capitalise on their investment, and use it to leverage sales of their operating system software. And I think the first casualty of any attempt to homogenise Skype is Microsoft's current threat: iOS, or maybe perhaps Android (but I think market share is what's on Microsoft's collective mind at the moment).

I dare Microsoft to prove me wrong on this one.

—tonza