Telecoms analysts believe that Microsoft could be a happier home for Skype than Facebook, and could ratchet up the battle against Google Voice and Apple's FaceTime on mobile devices and the desktop. They also warn, though, that with a rumoured price tag of $8.5bn (£5bn), the deal is hardly cheap.

Leif-Olof Wallin, research vice-president at Gartner

We think this is a positive thing for Microsoft. Skype is a very powerful brand with a huge install base. A lot of the features are complementary to what already exist in Windows Live (Hotmail, Messenger et al). There is a further potential to integrate this into Windows Phone as well as Xbox.

Richard Edwards, principal analyst at Ovum

With Apple FaceTime – a competitor to Skype – now available on the Mac, iPhone 4, iPad 2 and the new iPod touch, it is definitely now or never for Microsoft. There are other products and companies out there that offer a much better fit architecturally than Skype (and they come with a much cheaper price tag too), but Skype is undoubtedly the product Microsoft needs to stay in the game.

Skype is arguably the most successful real-time social communication platform on the planet, and its $8bn price tag means that only companies such as Microsoft have any chance of acquiring it. But is it a good fit for Microsoft's business model? Answer: Yes. It's popular, it runs on Windows PCs, and later this year it will be available on Windows Phone 7. Perhaps more importantly for the rest of us, Skype also runs on other computers, such as Mac and Linux, and mobile phones too, such iPhone and Android-based devices.

Skype is used by millions of consumers around the world to make free internet telephone calls and cheap calls to landlines, but we should not forget that Skype for Business also exists, making it an attractive, low-cost option for smaller companies looking for voice and video conferencing capabilities. For enterprises, Skype Connect lets organisations integrate Skype with their SIP-enabled PBXs (private telephone switchboards), and Skype Manager enables the business to track, trace and manage the use of this facility by employees.

Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analysis

If the deal goes ahead "as leaked" this is another major step for Microsoft's aggressive pursuit of Google and Apple, which also may have a secondary effect: further pain for the telcos and especially mobile IMS and its flag-waving applications VoLTE and RCS [Rich Communication Suite].

I'm pretty sure that a lot of the comment and analysis today will be around whether Microsoft can execute better than eBay, why the price is so high, whether this is "all about Google" and whether Skype would have been better off living inside Facebook. For me, this actually looks like a near-perfect fit for Skype. The other candidates I had in mind were Vodafone, AT&T, Cisco and Ericsson. No, not the most intuitive choices indeed – but companies with deep pockets, an interest in innovative services models and a willingness to pick and choose.

• A substantial part of Skype's current user base is from PCs. Although mobile devices get all the glory at the moment, Skype epitomises what's best about desktop VoIP. More importantly, a laptop is probably the perfect device for many video-calling use cases, as the keyboard+hinge and upright camera is much better ergonomically than a propped-up tablet or mobile phone. This would have been lost in a purely handset-focused company (eg Nokia in the past, RIM or perhaps Qualcomm). This may have ruled out Vodafone too, I guess.

• Skype gets widely used in business – often only semi-officially, but it's a critical tool for many travellers, people doing conference calls and so forth. It is also increasingly working on corporate-grade solutions. This would have been lost inside a Facebook or similar company.

More here.

Horace Dediu, who runs the analysis company Asymco

I see this as a pattern of consolidation of voice business models. I don't think it's coincidental that Apple, Microsoft and Google are all trying to secure assets, IP, experts and businesses in VoIP and in voice control. Voice is the next frontier both in IP-based communications and in user interfaces. Skype happens to be a very large pool of users who can be engaged with multiple services beside voice. These additional services can be the root of new business models.

Skype has been a hot potato for some time and nobody has quite figured out how to monetise the large user base. Exotic business models are always being debated but the winner will be something indirect which will come from experimentation and cross-fertilisation with other businesses. Microsoft has plenty of degrees of freedom to experiment (Windows Live, Bing, Windows Phone etc.) whereas neither Ebay nor Skype alone did. From that point of view, it's more valuable to Microsoft because it has more option value to Microsoft than it may have to other suitors.

Giles Cottle, senior analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media

Despite scepticism at Microsoft's ability to handle big acquisitions, Redmond is a better home for Skype than some of the company's other rumoured suitors. Google already has Google Voice, minimising the impact of such an acquisition. Facebook was another potential destination, but Informa believes the synergies between these two companies to be almost as over-estimated as those between Skype and eBay. If the oft-quoted mantra that most people are actually only friends with about 10% of their Facebook friends is true, then voice-calling within the service makes little sense.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has numerous ways in which it can make use of Skype: video-calling for Windows 7 Phones (and a competitor to FaceTime), offering a true PC-based VoIP service with Windows Live Messenger, voice chat in Xbox Live and, of course, strengthening its enterprise communications proposition.

Microsoft undoubtedly has overpaid for Skype in the short term but potentially not in the long term. Buying Skype gives Microsoft the ability to do whatever it wants with voice to an audience of 700 million users. This kind of scale does not come cheap.

Michael Clendenin, managing director of RedTech Advisors

In this atmosphere of Internet Bubble 2.0, picking up an unprofitable online company for roughly 10 times sales probably seems downright cheap ... But if you consider [Skype] was just valued at about $2.5bn 18 months ago when a chunk was sold off, then $8.5bn seems generous and means Microsoft has a high wall to climb to prove to investors that Skype is a necessary linchpin for the company's online and mobile strategy.