Skype was bought during the era of Ballmer and it was quite predictably going to deteriorate. Almost immediately Microsoft re-architected skype from being peer

Skype was bought during the era of Ballmer and it was quite predictably going to deteriorate. Almost immediately Microsoft re-architected skype from being peer-to-peer to a central server backend. The primary purpose for doing this seemed pretty clearly to make eavesdropping easier. Some suspected at the time that Microsoft was acting as a proxy for the US government in taking over Skype because otherwise the business justification looked pretty shaky given the purchase price and the relative ease of creating a competing technology. Given all of that people abandoned the system in droves.