I’ve been keeping my eye out for Skype news since MS bought them, and here’s the first big item I’ve seen, although I don’t really care about Live Messenger. What I’m more interest in is whether MS will mix Skype with Office Communicator. That’s a trickier switch because Communicator intentionally centralizes connectivity, whereas Skype is best known for it’s peer-to-peer connectivity (well, somewhat less so since MS brought the supernodes in-house).
http://www.osnews.com/story/26533/Microsoft_Dropping_Live_Messenger_for_Skype
Well since MS bought Skype it is no longer using the P2P network. There are a lot of conspiracy theory’s on MS working with US government because of the switch: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-supernodes-with-linux-boxes-hosted-by-microsoft/
Conor Klecker – not quite right. A quote from Skype in that very article: “supernodes simply allow users to find one another (calls do not pass through supernodes)”. The main bandwidth for skype still goes largely peer-to-peer. That’s why it remains much more bandwidth friendly (in my experience) than G+ hangouts, where all of the voice/video data has to bounce of a Google server even if all participants are on the same LAN.
I saw the UPDATE after I posted. I remember this story breaking earlier in the year. Never saw the followup from Skype. Good to know.