As Skype has been down since this morning and still is not back up, everybody using it must have realized that it is not a viable communication system, at least in a corporate context. To be honest, I'm actually happy this happens because I dislike Skype for several reasons:
Check out www.openwengo.org (*) for an open- source alternative that has a solutions for all the drawbacks I just mentioned.
See http://heartbeat.skype.com/2007/08/the_latest_on_the_skype_signon.html for the somewhat sleazy official message from SKype going to millions of users.
() Edited 2018-05-07: link dead, project seems to be non-existent at this point*