Actually I haven't been gaming much the past 2-3 years (Wii owner, and Nintendo pretty much screwed themselves since late 2010) I have been picking up a few PC games on Steam but my primary form of entertainment is film & TV.

What a crock of shit! MS loves to bait people to pay them unnecessary amounts of money. I wont even be using that unless its on Xbox Live Gold when I decide to get my Xbone. I swear to god if they had the chance they would try to find even more ways to drain us.

How did I know them giving away something for free for 6 months would be entirely twisted into something negative.

Skype is a fucking piece of shit. It has always been, even before MS bought it.

Anyone who dare say Skype > Messenger is not in their right mind.

damn thats something i actually want

It's the cool thing to do these days. Where have you been for the past year? Microsoft needs to die in every shape and form

I've been using it since they shut down Messenger (and I know it still works, but no one uses it because they made it so hard, to no point to it anymore), and it's pretty bad. I'm travelling this weeked and I've had to use my laptop and guess what? Skype doesn't appear to know even how to synchronize contacts between devices! And when I tried Skype on my phone one time (not too long ago, in the large scale), the stupid thing started synchronizing messages. You can guess what a mess it is when I chat a lot on Skype and don't use it much on my phone.... So many messages, cluttering up everything and hindering my use of the phone! My friend also complained about a similar experience, apparently it pretty much killed her phone when it was doing that.

And then there's the UI... It sure is nice to look at, and that's about all it's good for. The chat window is too small, can't be rescaled (well it can, but the text won't fill up the extra space, instead where will be only white space all around the text box). I always sign in in the same state I was in when I last used it (which sucks, because often I want to log in a while before I'm actually ready just so that it's easier to start using it; for those moments, signing in as 'Gone' or something would be great). I can't access the options of the program before logging in.

Worst of all, I have almost no need for the voice or video features. Judging by what I've heard, it's not good, though. For text messaging, Skype is pretty bad, which would be understandable if it did voice/video stuff well, but it doesn't sound like that's the case either.

Don't get me wrong, Skype isn't all terrible. It's just not very good, and it doesn't seem to be getting any better, so I hate the fact that I 'had to' switch over from Messenger to a greatly inferior product. I didn't like Messenger much either, but Skype is even worse.

Oh right, the topic. :P I suppose it's good they're giving those free months but on the other hand, I doubt it's going to be useful to that many people. If anything, it's a marketing ploy as always. Nothing wrong with that, of course.

Actually, it's extremely open.  For a console. 

I'll admit, I think, and I kind of hope, Microsoft makes an effort to regulate what applications are avalable on the Xbox One so we have awesome applications, but where apps run is the most closed system of the two VMs.  Each game appears to include its own OS, subsequently developers can actually modify the OS if they want.  I don't think developers have that level of configurability in any other console.

Skype is surely a downgrade compared to Windows Live Messenger. But isn't that a bit off topic? I think Sony fans are cute.

Are they sure this time? not gonna 180 like xbox music last week?