Microsoft Acquired Skype for $8.5 Billion Future of Linux Client is in Darkness

 

Microsoft acquired Skype – Online Video calling, VOIP client service- for a $8.5 Billion. This is the largest purchase for the company this year. The company is there for past 10 years and it is growing. Skype is regularly reffed as glitch free video and distortion free audio calling. Now Microsoft will integrate the facility for its windows 7 phones, Xbox, Kinect etc…

Currently Skype is with  600 million user accounts and  is one of the most popular cross-platform [Linux,windows,mac clients] desktop VoIP applications currently available. And ubuntu is announced that skype is available in ubuntu. The linux client is not getting any updates for past 5 years and the development is dead slow. But from now own MS will kill the client.

There are other alternatives available in Linux. Google released a programme for google talk to support video and audio in linux. Also Empathy and pidgin added google talk audio,video calling. Still the No1 quality client is skype, which is going to be distroyed with in one year. Also the future of skype client for android is in darkness.

Steve Ballmer’s team promises to continue “to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms.” But as like a general strategy of MS they will kill other OS clients.

Skype for Linux has never been on active development with Skype team. The client for linux is lagging behind  features and support Windows, OS X, and even other mobile platforms. Still, Skype for Linux is a perfectly usable application, good support and integration with webcams and sound cards. Since the application is decidedly not open source, if Skype’s new owners decide to kill it, then it will certainly die. Such is the curse of proprietary software.

Skype will soon disappear from the iPhone, Android and Palm device, and possibly Blackberry.
Basically there are two possibilities; either nothing changes, or Microsoft will put the audio and video codecs into Messenger, turn Skype logins into Live IDs and then kill the product entirely.