When we see the mac version stagnate, we won't be able to say MS has sabotaged it - skype did that before on their own.
The linux version has never been on parity with the others - will it be officially killed? Might MS actually put resources in to it to make it work as well as the others?
Overall, good on MS for doing this. I'm assuming this may bring on some more interesting dynamics to the google voice / skype party.
After acquisition, MS will put out a lot of PR saying that cross-platform is "very important" in this new acquisition, they will even release an updated version on cross-platform. ...of course that update will be screwed up as it has been "fixed" to make all versions more "windows friendly" at the expense of features that may be better on other platforms (i.e. scrap the Mac interface, kill open protocols, replace working code with .net tech, etc.).
Then after a few months of user complaints there will be MS's product performance review, since after alienating the Linux and Mac folk, they will declare there is no viable market for those platforms any more and close those divisions and thus drag it into the Windows only division.
Yep, I've been around for several of those (FoxBase/FoxPro, Bungie Games, Flight Simulator, etc. to just name a few) - if they were selling a shirt about it I'd have already worn it out.
So the protocol is already OK, the client however they'll convert it to using as many Windows specific technologies as possible.
That may be true, but in my experience, I could barely get skype running on an old windows box: it would routinely grind the system to a halt. In 2010 I switched to that box to SuSE 11, where Skype, though a bear to set up, ran smoothly, with a non-noticable frame rate and better-than-TV graphics on old hardware (circa 2003 2GHz Dell with 1 GB RAM. It did that while providing NFS filesharing to another computer playing movies and a laptop playing audio.
The audio setup hassle had all the features of any other sound setup headache in Linux. I lay that problem squarely in the lap of the Linux sound community.
If Skype isn't the default, verbed, system, doesn't it lose some value?
The cloud is more important to MS than WP7 is.