Pal Om Malik tells us all that Skype is dropping their desktop API access in favor of a URI approach.
Reading through the story and then going into the Skype Developer web site makes me feel this is a play on the whole Microsoft approach to WebRTC that is slowly emerging. At the same time seeing, and hearing, the improvements made to Google Hangouts, I'm becoming less and less Skype centric as I'm now receiving calls inside the browser via Hangouts.
To me this feels more like death by a thousand cuts as Skype seems to be making changes that make them less relevant and more challenging to work with.