I would respectfully say that ooVoo and Skype can be compared in a couple of critical ways:
- Reliability: during installation, configuration, and operation, ooVoo works about a thousand times better than Skype. Maybe more, I lost count...
- Bloat: you are concerned about bloat? Have you looked at what is behind the curtain with Skype? The "plug-in manager", which is not only huge, but is famous for memory leaks, so it grows over time as it runs? The "Browser Plug-Ins", which commandeer IE7 or Firefox, change anything that even remotely resembles a phone number to something that is so large you generally can't read all of it, and frequently just go insane and either cause the browser to crash, or start opening the Skype web page over and over again in an infinite loop, making the browser unusable. The Outlook interface, which silently goes rummaging around in your address book (corporate data centers are particularly fond of this one)?
- Support: ooVoo - EXCELLENT. Skype: Support? What support? There is none. NONE! The closest they have to "support" is their User Forums, which is why their forums get literally hundreds of new posts a day, vs. less than 10 here. Unfortunately, the quality of the assistance offered in their forums has gone down the toilet now too. The overwhelming majority of the answers given by the self-appointed "experts" there are "try installing SplitCam" to fix any and every video problem (and Skype has plenty of them), or "go back to Skype version 3.5.x" for absolutely anything else - and for video problems if SplitCam doesn't help. Never mind that Skype 3.5 has a number of known, serious, security problems. Oh, and the friendly, helpful "experts" in their forums are now starting to hold out their hands for "donations" in return for their sterling advice...
End of rant...