verging on random

Death by Microsoft

May 10, 2011 on 10:10 pm | In Uncategorized | No Comments

I use Skype almost every day. Once upon a time I thought it was great; more recently I’ve come to hate it. It’s fallen victim to the Firefox/iTunes “Hey let’s update again cos we haven’t done it for a week at least” trap. Every update seems to add pointless new features and make the whole application more prone to random crashes and conflicts with hardware.

Today I found out the reason why:

Microsoft Corp. is close to a deal to buy Internet phone company Skype Technologies SA for between $7 billion and $8 billion—the most aggressive move yet by Microsoft to play in the increasingly-converged worlds of communication, information and entertainment.

Naturally Skype wants the merger to go smoothly and has therefore been deliberately creating a Microsoft-clone culture.

I guess it’s time to look seriously at Google chat.