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NAT / Firewalls cause a lot of issues. Peer to peer data isn't as straightforward as you'd expect.

The Skype people actually came from Kazaa, so they had a lot of experience with sending peer data across corporate / educational firewalls.

WebRTC is trying to generalize the technology, but it's new.

Users. Skype is the replacement for MSN Messenger, which people just used for chatting with friends.

Plus asynchronous text chat.