How Does Microsoft/Skype Deal Impact Windows Phone 7

If you have been following the tech news then you should already be familiar with Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Skype at a whopping $8.5 billion. Now that’s all fine and dandy but for those of you who are still rooting for Windows Phone 7, what does Microsoft’s latest acquisition of Skype mean for you? Perhaps those who use Skype heavily and who rely it on for work might see that Windows Phone 7 with Skype integration as a marriage made in heaven.

The first couple of things that come into mind would be video calls and free VoIP calls. BusinessInsider seems to think so too by saying:

Imagine integrated Skype calls at no extra cost. And this will easily be WP7′s answer to Apple’s FaceTime or Android’s video chat via Google Talk.

Skype is already on millions of computers, making the network instantly larger than anything FaceTime could hope to achieve. (For now, FaceTime is limited to iDevices and Macs.)

Both extremely solid reasons as to how this Skype deal with Microsoft could very well add an additional selling point to Windows Phone 7 devices.

In terms of video calling Apple has been dominating in that department with them using Facetime as a featured selling point which not only allows users to call phone to phone, but phone to Macs and vice versa. However I doubt that this integration will be happening any time soon but it does seem like a definite possibility in the future as Microsoft would be silly not to integrate it into the Windows Phone 7 operating system.