A point lost in the hype around the $7.7 billion purchase of Skype by Microsoft was Skype’s gradual interest in the healthcare area, in evidence in their sponsorship of the mHealth Summit and international telemedicine initiatives less than one year ago. Because Skype is free, US healthcare professionals had started to use it for videoconferencing with hospitals, colleagues and patients despite potential privacy concerns. Will this be a selling point with Microsoft and Windows 7 into healthcare, especially for mobile, or will it fall short? Steven Vaughan-Nichols of ZDNet tells us what he really feels. Microsoft’s Ballmer $7.7-billion Skype blunder
**Updated 13 May, pm** Did you know that Skype was built on a variant of the early ’00s Kazaa P2P file sharing platform, so that your voice and video, according to Mr. Vaughan-Nichols, is passed from one Skyper to another? And that in order to work, it is dependent on non-firewalled PCs? It’s all free, and a bit sketchy. Will Microsoft keep it this way? One wonders, but right now it’s not ready for healthcare. ZDNet: How Skype does, and does not, work.