I can guarantee that not a single person on my Skype contact list will be aware of this story; and many will probably have forgotten that MSFT are in the process of buying Skype in the first place.
or after the deal - how bad is microsoft
If Microsoft knew that Skype's agreements exposed them to significant legal liability, which now seems the case, they would have made it a point of negotiation.
Microsoft might have some financial exposure which presumably they have covered - and of course it is not in Silverlake's interest to create poison pills because the relatively small profits are unlikely to balance the financial exposure from a potential Microsoft lawsuit. Not to mention that it is almost certainly in Silverlake's interest to get the deal closed, deliver profits to the LP's, and move on to look for new investments.
It's not as if Microsoft is getting a company gutted of people with technical expertise or domain expertise - and the key assets of brand, infrastructure, and technology are not being affected.
Looking at the people who have been reported to be affected by this, it is hard to see any key personnel involved. Yee Lee appears to be just another employee and the executives alluded to were at least in large part, fairly recent hires; and none of them were founders or early employees - any of those who were eligible would almost certainly have cashed out in 2005 when eBay bought the company (and potentially cashed out again when Silverlake purchased from eBay).
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2693496]
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2672786]
I would suspect that most employees who stick it out through the acquisition are looking forward to the differences of workplace environment which will come with the transition from a private equity culture to Microsoft's corporate culture.
This story seems to have traction on two fronts, both as a Microsoft bashing peace and as a cautionary startup tale neither of which is accurate: it is unreasonable to imply that they could (let alone should) have made Skype's existing employee stock purchase agreements a point of negotiation. Likewise, Skype is not a startup. It's the Jeep of the digital age - Skype has been little more than an asset within a portfolio since 2005's purchase by eBay.