The article misses out that Skype also provided Opus codec: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-codec-opus http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-codec-opus. B

The article misses out that Skype also provided Opus codec: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-codec-opus http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-codec-opus. But apart from that WebRTC is supposed to be an open standard and Mozilla and Google are already implementing it. So Microsoft not doing it would be quite risky for them. It is perhaps the reason why they bought Skype in the first place. Also since being acquired (as stated in the article) Skype has been providing the backend for Facebook video. Moreover, Matthew Kaufman (http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/10mar/slides/tsvarea-1.pdf http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/10mar/slides/tsvarea-1.pdf) works with Skype, as does Jonathan Rosenberg (of SIP fame: http://www.jdrosen.net/ http://www.jdrosen.net/). So apart from the original inventors of Skype they have people who have built other Video and Voice products.