Report: Microsoft to Ditch Xbox Live Voice Chat with Skype for Durango
Microsoft might be ditching Xbox Live voice chat...
Recently, Microsoft announced that it would be retiring Windows Live Messenger for the much more popular voice chat service Skype.
Now, according to a source close to CVG, Microsoft may be scrapping Xbox Live voice chat in favor of Skype for its next-gen console, codenamed Durango.
“You might jump to the conclusion that we’ll see asynchronous voice and video messages in next-gen Xbox Live,” the source stated.
Considering that Microsoft's been trying to consolidate its platforms, it's not surprising that it's trying to make Skype the uniform service to use. Recent Microsoft job listings, calling for team members for the Skype Xbox team, indicate that this rumor isn't baseless.
A Microsoft spokesperson only offered this comment to Tom's Hardware: "We are always thinking about what is next for our platform, but we have nothing further to share at this time."
Microsoft is expected to unveil Durango sometime this year, though it's unclear whether or not it'll do so at GDC in March or E3 in June.

Now we need to see their multimedia sorted out. I have Music and WMP on my PC. They do not talk to eachother, they do not view my music the same way, and they mess with each other's libraries, which is annoying. Personally I like the UI of Music better... but I cannot get it to display all songs of a CD together, and it will not recognize the song order of all of my old music (opting instead to alphabetize everything). I have 20+GB of music... am I supposed to re-rip all of those CD's? And what of the MP3 CDs purchased off of other services like Amazon? Will those simply always have my songs out of order? I would simply use WMP by default, but Music is what is used by my phone, and is the platform that MS is going to keep developing, so I kinda need to get this all sorted.
And why can't we get a media player that can handle TV shows and Movies properly the way we have songs on a CD? Is there just no nice way to group a bunch of files into a folder and call it a TV episodes or a movie series other than manually making a ton of playlists? If my phone can automate the process of collecting and merging contacts with a pretty high accuracy rate, then why on earth cant my PC automatically figure out that when a folder is called "Lord of the Rings" and it has 3 movies in it, that those might somehow be related?
+1 this!
You can get one, it does everything you have asked for an more
...
It is called XBMC
Nah, Skype is a third party program.
Tool, What ever MS I will never buy one of your Crapbox consols that have a person pay for your service and can't or won't even play a Blue Ray movie and Win 7-64 is the last OS for gaming I will ever buy too. STEAM on Ubuntu and OS X along with the Playstation 4 will be my platforms of choice.
Another MS tool