REDMOND, Wash. — It's been almost a year since since Microsoft completed its $8.5 billion acquisition of Internet calling firm Skype, used by consumers and businesses globally to make cheap calls and calls over video. To some regular users, "skyping" has become a verb. Before landing at Microsoft, the company was founded in 2003, and eventually acquired by eBay.USA TODAY's Edward C. Baig recently talked withTony Bates, president of the Skype Division, aboutSkype's direction.Edited for space and clarity.  Q: How is the marriage going with Microsoft?  A: Very well. Skype has always been much more than just a way of doing low-cost calling. We think we can change the way people communicate across multiple platforms — on your PC, the mobile phone, in your living room. And we set our goal to get to not just hundreds of millions but billions of users, and change it from an experience that wasn't just an appointment to talk like we're doing now but became an everyday sharing experience.  There's a huge set of great assets that we can leverage within the Microsoft family to accelerate that vision to get to a billion people.  Q: How close are you to the billion?  A: 254 million monthly active users. We've been consistently growing somewhere around 40% year on year, and that's pretty dramatic when you consider the base is going up.  Q: What works with Microsoft that maybe didn't work with eBay and some previous owners of Skype?  A: In many ways we're quite similar. There's a definite software culture that runs deep across both organizations. And there is definitely a strong belief system, certainly at my level and Steve (Ballmer's) level, that communications is a fundamental human need that crosses over into a lot of things. Finally, there's always been a sort of disruptive innovation culture that we've certainly had within Skype but you also see that very, very strongly represented within Microsoft.  Q: How do you make Skype more of an everyday experience?  A: It needs to become more seamless, and, quite candidly, easier to use on mobile smartphones. The big No. 1 focus for us is we see this huge shift to more and more people on the go and bringing their own devices, and we need to have the best possible experience to do that.  A: Video at peak times is greater than 50% of our traffic. Remember, a lot of our peak times are around unique events, Mother's Day, Christmas.  Video has become a powerful way to interact socially, interact with business.  We deliver that notion of (sharing) some of the most amazing moments — when you can't be together, whether it's a baby being born, people getting married, seeing your kids go off to school.  A: What we think really separates us at the top level is the power of the network. The thing that makes communications so powerful is you can go to the device you want to, it works the way you want it to work and it works that way across different devices, whether it's a smart TV running a Skype application or an iPhone or a Windows Phone or Windows PC. I think in social apps we're No. 2 on the iPad, I think on the iPhone we're running No. 5 overall, and we've been very, very successful on other platforms. When it comes to the world of mobile, increasingly that's been defined by the application ecosystem. Our users are obviously voting with their feet, and that's why we have such great success on iOS, as well as on Android.  Q: Skype will be part of the new Office, but it's not there yet. Why?  A: We're nine months in (with Microsoft). It just takes a little bit of time for planning cycles and cadences. You know, if you put everything in a pot, nothing's technologically hard on its own. It's now aligning those schedules.  Q: Skype and Windows 8?  A: We haven't said much publicly relative to Windows 8 and Skype, but I could say that I think Windows 8 looks like a very transformative operating system. It's certainly unique in that it really crosses desktops and tablets. So stay tuned on that.  Q: Skype and Xbox/Kinect? A natural fit?  A: Definitely. We just haven't talked about when we're going to announce something. For us, Xbox is one gateway into the living room. Just to kind of give you some rough numbers, we're in tens of millions of pre-installed smart TVs today.  Q: How would you describe your Facebook relationship?  A: Facebook has been a great relationship so far. We provide all the underpinnings to the video calling and audio calling, actually, for anyone within the Facebook Web network.  Q: Tell me about what you're doing with education.  A: We have a Skype in the Classroom initiative. We're not necessarily going to focus on education, but we see this community of teachers who are using Skype as a tool to either co-teach or bring experts into the classroom that they couldn't do for financial (or other) reasons. We think we can get a million teachers signed up. It started as a grass-roots effort, and then we put some resources behind the initiative. My personal favorite involved a beehive. A kindergarten teacher was able to Skype a beekeeper into the class so students could see the bees up close.
Skype President Tony Bates says the goal is to make skyping an "everyday sharing experience" with a billion users.