Communicator replacement?

How about selling private skype clouds or webex-type services? Skype's reasonably reliable and has an easy client setup. See how much a video conference hardware + software system costs and then tell me there's no money it! They could do a sort of "google mail for business" thing with a private grouping hosted on an external cloud. All you need is to open a couple of firewall ports and all your internal pc's get an internal voip capability via your exchange/AD server.

Then there's the IP. Maybe they want to integrate proprietary things into WinMoPho so that when you walk into the office you pick up your AD assigned deskphone number to your mobile.

Have you ever seen the price tag on a cisco ip phone? You could get two pc's for that. They've admitted Windows on ARM, how about getting a slice of all that deskphone business by wrapping it all into AD?

How about voip based on email addresses? If Exchange does that, there are lots of companies using exchange who could turn that feature on in a later release. With a large potential user base (via exchange, not skype), it might be a reason to stick with exchange/windows rather than a unix mail system. A private skype/pstn gateway (exchange? communicator?) could try dialing free skype addresses and fall back to pstn if that fails.

If you aren't concentrating on pushing skype to price-sensitive end-users, there are possibilities out there.

But 8bn? Barking!

Cue google voice going international.... because they can and it makes life fun for their staff :)