Re: Microsoft/Skype. A couple of thoughts.

Attention is what's on sale here - not the technology. It's human eyeballs sold as a commodity. 

There's also the idea of information overload. What audiences really want is not more buckets of information, but the filtering out of irrelevant information.  So a location with an uncluttered screen that people stare at while they talk to each other - maybe there's some value in that.

Or maybe Microsoft just wants to be a bit more cool?