SkypeJournal reported yesterday that Skype is removing voice conference calling from GroupMe. There likely are a thousand reasons but the reality of this is GroupMe wasn't engineered to use Skype as the voice conferencing engine and for the past few years Skype has had a conferencing platform sitting on the shelf.
There's also this teeny, weeny company called Microsoft that has a servcie called LiveMeeting, which has been around for years. So while Skype and Microsoft are clearly at arms length, papa Microsoft doesn't want to start propelling services that eat away at their core services, especially as cloud based offerings like Live365 can link into services like LiveMeeting, as can Lync.
So while Skype bought GroupMe to improve their SMS platform, Microsoft didn't buy Skype to replace anything they're selling. Quite the opposite, the bought Skype to sell more of what they have. By purchasing Skype, Microsoft got the major carriers in the world who are already their partners to come to them. It was the best $9 billion dollar direct marketing campaign one could ever imagine.
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