Becoming a phone company was never in their best interests. VOIP has been looking for the killer app for 10 years. Unfortunately, everyone who does it winds up competing on cost.
Why? Because the telephone has had over 100 years of innovation. So every VOIP company recreates the wheel and sells it for less than the telcos or PBX companies by making it free or almost free. In the end cellphones will win out. The only thing people seem to care about VOIP for is games. The rest of the time they're just as likely to pick up a cell phone or land line.
Liking Skype and Skype being profitable on the scale neccessary to justify its acquisition price are two different venues.
The goal of skype was to empower the eBay users and drive more users to eBays core auction business. It never materialized. The probelm is that VoIP services have a tendency to try and compete by being free or near free. It's not that there is no cost associated with the technology, but that's the easiest, least creative way to pull customers.
VoIP is evolutionary not revolutionary. They treated it as something revolutionary and made a messy business acquisition that was far outside their realm of expertise.
Why? Because the telephone has had over 100 years of innovation. So every VOIP company recreates the wheel and sells it for less than the telcos or PBX companies by making it free or almost free. In the end cellphones will win out. The only thing people seem to care about VOIP for is games. The rest of the time they're just as likely to pick up a cell phone or land line.