As of today, I will make a concerted effort to move all my communications OFF Skype.

Microsoft has bought Skype for $8 billion (odd). I’m not even going to go into the arguments and blah blah about how Microsoft will keep the product alive etc etc, since quite honestly there is no track record or reason to believe that they will keep Skype multi-platform.

Skype multi-platform support officially ended today, in the same way that Oracle’s acquisition of Sun/MySQL officially ended any kind of support for Oracle’s acquired Sun/MySQL products.

I’ve never really liked Google Talk, it’s UI was a bit dodgy, and not many people were on it. I predict that may change, and maybe Google Talk will heavily influence some of the way forward for IP telephony, but I don’t bargain on that, in the same way that I won’t bargain on any single vendor-based telephony platform ever again.

I also predict that the OpenSource community (or a risky venturer) will finally tie something together to make Skype obsolete using the business model that made Skype successful in the first place but without all the proprietary ugliness.

Skype’s advantage has been a nice captive market, and a proprietary protocol, and centralized registry, all of which has been obsoleted by a number of projects for a few years now. The only cause for lack of adoption behind alternative solutions has been momentum, and I’ve contributed to that “non-cause”.

The Skype platform has been dealt it’s  final death knoll today in the same way Nokia’s Windows Mobile strategy has signaled the dying gasp of an irrelevant platform.

I’ve been using Skype as my primary IM/Messaging/VOIP platform for years. It’s kinda hard to get the divorce procedure going, but I’ve got no issue doing it. I’ve one it before.  My switch from Yahoo!Messenger and MSN Messenger took a few years but in the end, it wasn’t that hard to do.

And let’s face it, how relevant is MSN Messenger or Yahoo/AOL IM these days ?

Long live open IP-based telecommunication.

Goodbye Skype. I won’t miss you.