Fring to users:

I honestly cannot understand why Skype would be upset about companies like Fring that fill a need that they are sorely unable to fill themselves. If anything, Fring was helping their image. They allowed users to use skype on mobile devices, a place where Skype has NEVER been able to go (not successfully, at least: their android app is not really VoIP, they discontinued their WinMo app, and symbian… what’s that? and even Palm, which back in the day was the most requested client in the history of ever that never got fulfilled) Heck, Their DESKTOP Linux app is a horrid disaster. Fring ALLOWED people to SPEND MONEY from their skype accounts on their mobiles. I honestly cannot understand why would skype do such a thing, unless they were planning on imminently releasing their own batch of apps (which hasn’t happened, and let’s be honest, probably won’t).
Lately I’ve started to see Skype a lot like Apple: in the beginning they were cool little companies, providing exactly what people wanted in an easy to use and pretty package. But when they got a huge grip on the market (and Skype dominates it undisputably), they turned into control freaks not wanting anyone to do anything with their products that the company did not intend by design.
For quite a few years now I (and you too Phil) have decried the need for skype to open up more to the community (by publicising their protocols and allowing third party apps to use the infrastructure) in order to continue to grow and to create this perfect ecosystem that Niklas and Janus dreamt in the beginning. It would all have been great for skype and if anything people would continue to use their service more and more and in ways they couldn’t have imagined before. But alas, they wanted to stay closed. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it has more or less worked out OK, as long as you used Windows and to a lesser degree Mac. But lately, even the Windows client (>4.0) is impossibly bloated and complicated. So I don’t know what their big plan is. Combine this with the announcement a few weeks back that they would be CHARGING for skype to skype calls (breaking their famous promise) over 3G on their iPhone client… And I suddenly don’t like this company so much anymore.
Myself, I can easily turn to (and actually do use) SIP, but the damage is already done in the sense that now every granma knows and has Skype installed on her computer… And just like facebook, now that the problems have arisen it will take huge amounts of time and effort to migrate people into open alternatives. Damn it.