IT managers and IT buyers are obviously not the target market for Skype. They just buy that stuff from CISCO.
Skype has invested considerable development resources into making P2P work over NAT, circumventing firewalls, cloaking and encrypting their traffic to evade packet inspection. Even the client itself is heavily obfuscated. The point of this all is of course to not threaten the P2P model that has allowed them to essentially scale unlimited.
Now, you have Microsoft replacing that with the standard centralized infrastructure that scales terribly. Huh.
Not only is this a waste of my resources it also
provides a shit experience of dropped calls, sudden
drops in quality, and connection issues.
Skype for me is the best VoIP system I've ever used. Voice calls work fine even over my phone's 3G connection, which compared to a broadband line is piss poor. Video calls sometime have hiccups, but it worked for me in situations where more traditional client-server solutions were unusable.
Do those clients accept incoming connections? The only reason as far as I know for the supernodes is to break through firewalls.
If there is no firewall the skype connections are direct from client to client and they don't go through any other peer, microsoft or not.
I have yet to get high quality video to work on skype, even between two clients each with 10+ mbps lines. MS knows this is a problem.
More than likely Skype will be for SMB and residential use and high end enterprise will continue to use Lync or alternatives. This is a welcome move as it legitimizes Skype for many.