[brudgers]

Having at one time worked in a Fortune 100 company, people take a lot of calls on their mobile phone while sitting at their desk. Those plan minutes add up.

Like most Microsoft products, the big fish is enterprise, not consumers. The 3D game comparison is somewhat misleading.

As an aside, the current version of Windows Phone was developed prior to the acquisition of Skype. Closer integration in future versions would not be unexpected.

[jsnell]

Ah, right. I forgot about the silly American idea of the receiver paying for a call instead of the caller. My experience with Skype is that it's very rarely used for making phone calls to normal numbers, but used all the time for long-distance / international calls with somebody expecting that call. There's very little benefit to using a mobile terminal in a case like that.

My point about battery life might not have been well made. It's not that games are an alternative to Skype, but that it's just absurdly power-hungry. Even more so than the apps that you'd expect to be the real hogs. My Nexus S usually goes 2-3 days between charges. If I leave Skype running in the background, it's drained in less than 8 hours.

Controlling that largest VoIP network in the world might well be valuable to MS. But to date I just haven't seen any evidence of it mixing well with mobile phones.