Microsoft & Skype are hard at work on a competitor to WebRTC, and don't appear to have any plans to support this - they seem in favour of moving VoIP to the browser, but they're going to do it in a Microsoft-y way.

And of course, the Skype acquisition was purchasing marketshare, not technology.

I wouldn't be surprised if this particular development was in part spurred on by Microsoft being able to say "look, none of the WebRTC clients interoperate, so we might as well create our own standard."

This might force Skype to move into the browser. Sort of how Spotify can be launched from the web, users will be able to call from inside the browser via a bridge plugin as long as Skype is running in the background.

That's still a losing proposition in the long term, again the plugin-free WebRTC. Imagine everything else besides Skype works through WebRTC.

The value in skype comes from:

Directory services Calling out to external services, e.g. cell phones (The value for yesterday's users) Skype integration with devices like cell phones (the value for tomorrow's users)

WebRTC doesn't really get you anywhere on these 3 fronts on it's own. What it does is commoditise the voice traffic component of Skype, something they really haven't cared about for years.

I thought that MS was pushing some form of WebRTC to get Skype working in the browser?

Yeah, some proprietary form of WebRTC, though. You know Microsoft...

You can already do this with Skype through Facebook.

Depends how much hardware continues to remain on most machines. If the market eventually shifts towards dumber and dumber boxes (as people keep predicting) that centralised model will still be sweet for performing things like encoding.

Remote encoding of VoIP doesn't make much sense, especially if the V is video. Processing power will be cheaper than bandwidth for a long time when you're talking about this much data (CD quality mono audio: 700kbits/s, 720p30 4:2:0 video: 332mbits/s).

There is probably still going to be a need for a centralized server to see who is/isn't online.

Hopefully more features do end up in the browser and not within the walled gardens of Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.