Yahoooo, can you hear me now?

Big news of the week is that Yahoo is now taking calls, well, its instant messenger to be more precise. For $10 or $25 credit paid up front (calling-card style) your Yahoo! Messenger can now place outbound calls and receive inbound calls from regular POTS (plain old telephone service) lines. This would be bad news for Google chat, but since nobody actually uses that service it only impacts Skype. Skype is only coming out with video chat now, years behind Yahoo. It is also doing that in beta and we all know what that means. Skype on the other hand has had the largest VoIP database for years but its dial-in services have been in beta (broken, bad echo, reverb, static, "Luke, I am your father") voice quality for so long I think I am perhaps the only one still using it. This ought to be an easy sell for Yahoo and little incentive for current Skype users to go to Skype 2.0 once it is actually released. Being first-to-market is the most important, perhaps only second to quality, in the new .com era and Microsoft and Google are such far distant 3rd and 81st place that even Bill Gates wouldn't honor them with the "me too" tag.