Come with me if you want to live (chat)

Microsoft is purchasing the video chat company Skype for $8.5 billion, and you should be excited.

If you feel that you are not excited, try to relax and continue reading. Skype is a p2p (peer-to-peer communication program capable of world-wide video chat).

Its designers were the developers of Kazaa; a program not unlike the genie Kazaam in that it grants all of your wishes, and you do not tell your parents about it no matter where it touched your hard drive.

The creators never developed a Shaq skin for Kazaa, but they did use the peer-to-peer idea to run Skype’s chat system which makes calling free, no matter where you live in the world.

Not only did these pirates make billions off their creation, they also get to keep their jobs at the helm of Skype .

Why does this matter? Well, you now see two of Microsoft’s rivals; Google and Apple each have equivalent programs to handle p2p chat and likely feel waves from this multi-billion dollar deal.

With Skype now arming mega corporation Microsoft, the video chat triforce is now complete, and someone is going to make a move to make their program
the standard.

These tech giants are about to have a battle of wits, a battle of skill, a battle of who can teach computers how to best recognize (unwanted) genitalia.

The result of these battles will be known as the future.

I don’t imagine we will become dependant on video booths basked in the glow of lasers and spaceship exhaust; we’ll mostly use our spaceship exhaust basked laser phones, game systems and computers for video chat.

For smart devices, advanced video chat capabilities may develop. Over the course of the next ten years, Google could standardize the face tracking camera, Microsoft might further improve high performance video streaming and Apple will no doubt cover the whole thing in fancy plastic and chrome.

As computers grow ever cheaper, operators of airports, hotels and other public places could realize how awesome video phone booths are, allowing us to enjoy a golden age of videophones on every corner.

Estonia, a little country in northern Europe, already began propping Skype booths up in their airports in March.

If you are still not excited about talking face to face at any time with anybody in the world, you need to be optimistic and not read the following disclaimer.

Alright, so this revolution is not inherently good for humanity, and many video phone futures could be classified as depressingly dystopian.

I’m not saying for sure we’re going to end up huddling to the side of our grey living rooms to avoid the unrelenting gaze of our supreme leader as he judges us with ruthless precision through the 200 inch window in all our homes, but our children might just be lucky enough to be comrades.

At least Google doesn’t mind if we keep journals, as long as they are written on Google docs.

­— tdagley@indiana.edu