Different boats, I agree. Skype is an additional plugin I think, so you don't need to have skype installed on your device. But that's the whole point. Google is

Different boats, I agree. Skype is an additional plugin I think, so you don't need to have skype installed on your device. But that's the whole point. Google is the new Microsoft, though probably not as much evil. They have wide interests in almost all areas from search engine, android, chrome os, social, browser etc. So they can really control and push what fits their needs. Tomorrow if Facebook comes out with their own browser, they would surely push skype baked in, into the browser rather than make it an additional installation. When I mentioned the word "monstrous", I meant that in terms of the implementation and code size. I am not sure of XMPP, but SIP I think is. There are tons of new rfcs, specs and drafts that have come up which one has to implement for effective interoperable SIP sessions.