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Is this Google's response to MS purchasing skype? Seems like the classic strategy of commoditizing your competitor's business (and they get a 2-for-1 deal since Apple is also wielding FaceTime).

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Hm, I don't think so. This post is dated May 3rd, which predates the Skype deal's announcement by 7 days. Also, the WhatWG group for RTC's mailing list was first posted to April 12, 2011. So that potentially indicates this was in the works beforehand. Since Google purportedly put in a bid for Skype they no-doubt knew Skype was on the market, though.

I would guess this is more likely a response to FaceTime. Apple's core business is around getting people to buy iPhones, and FaceTime is exclusive to the iPhone and other Apple products.

We can also see the project's creation time on http://code.google.com/p/webrtc/updates/list, Jan 27 2011

There is an IETF realtime-web working group :

http://tools.ietf.org/wg/rtcweb/charters

and this is part of Google's involvement with that.

However the original question is still valid, as this release might have been accelerated quite a bit because MS bought Skype.

great point. I think a major reason MS bought skype was integrate it with kinect, which somewhat mitigates this.

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