Microsoft is planning to make full use of its somewhat extravagant purchase of Skype. The company plans to retire its Windows Live Messenger service by early 2013 and migrate is over 100 million Messenger users to Skype. This change wont affect users in mainland China, which will continue to use Messenger in the near future.
In order to smoothen the transition, users are encouraged to download the latest version of Skype, which supports merging your Windows Live Messenger and Skype accounts. Once they are merged, you can continue corresponding with your friends, contacts and family through the Skype UI.
This transition is a long time coming and while we are somewhat surprised that the much larger Windows Messenger user base are being transitioned to Skype. However we feel this was done in Microsoft best interest to continue their newly refined ‘cool’ look.
Have you made the transition to Skype from Windows Live Messenger? If not you can download Skype for Windows right now to get started.
source – The Verge