Interestingly, if Microsoft does buy Skype and make it Windows only, they would be opening a huge door for GChat as [EDIT: the obvious] cross-platform client. FaceTime too, I guess, if Apple decides to move in that direction.
If Skype isn't the default, verbed, system, doesn't it lose some value?
GChat is already totally cross platform since it's just XMPP. There are tons of clients out there. You can run your own jabber server and connect to @gmail.com addresses, even.
On that node, didn’t Apple say, via Steve Jobs at the presentation where it was announced, that FaceTime was to become an open standard? What ever happened to that?
He did, but that’s the last we’ve heard of it as of yet [last I heard it discussed]. I doubt they killed it forever though, it’s not like Apple to make a false announcement (vaporware); it is like Apple to de-prioritize the speed of open sourcing that stack over developing/improving/iterating their own implementation and/or iOS ecosystem as a whole.
For what I understood, the protocols are open, but you can't join in the network without a private key signed by Apple :). It seems to use fairly standard protocols though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FaceTime#Standards
Why? MS seems to be more aggressively supporting iOS than WP7. See how often the Bing app has been updated on iOS than WP7 over the past year.
The cloud is more important to MS than WP7 is.
Not so fast. Have you seen the Bing and Microsoft research apps? Bing also is being used on Chinese versions of the Dell Android phones instead of Google.
I hope not. The Skype client on iOS is really handy.
Don't think so, as Microsoft makes great Bing apps for iOS and Android.