the software giants are now the owners of the world number one internet telephone skype which has over 180 million active users

Very good business deal in my opinion.

Big deal really! i have been praying that Skype gets more main stream than the eBay prison it was held for almost four years.I am interested in seeing how the VoIP markets will play out.One thing however is that Skype is proprietary and how Microsoft intends to integrate this will be a must watch.
I also see another angle to all of this.With this acquisition,the desktop VoIP battle will be won by MS.Why? Skype's users are not ready to hang up yet and with over 90bn minutes of video and voice calls,thsi might just be MS answer to Google's Gtalk.How it will play out with Mobile is another kettle of fish where fring and Gtalk are holding sway.It's going to be interesting going from here.What i see is the next couple of PCs and notebooks,Tablets and the likes with the windows OS running a free Voice,video and chat-unified messaging at it's best!
Google and yahoo, over to you(they both offered $2bn and $4bn respectively for Skype.Facebook did too,i have no idea what Facebook offered)