70 million people online at the same moment: is this real growth?

We went in about one week from 60 million concurrent Skype Users online to 70 million today!

Never such a growth in the past! The phenomenal growth of the Skype concurrent users online (see the number at the bottom of your Skype client window for older versions or the Skype RSS feed here) is clearly due to the availability of Skype through Outlook.com (the former hotmail service of Microsoft) as announced some days ago here.

But, is it real growth? I mean, will people logging in in their Outlook.com mailbox really use Skype?

First, if I understand it well, everybody (from a limited amount of very important countries) has Skype enabled whenever they go into their Outlook.com account. Therefore they come online without really asking for it!

Second, some people have probably not merged their Skype account and their Outlook.com (or Microsoft) account. Therefore they are « twice » online « on Skype ». This is therefore (temporarily?) inflating the real number of persons online.

Be aware that I was NOT a Hotmail user, and I am still not an Outlook.com user. Therefore I speak without having tested anything. So, feel free to criticise!

Question? Will all these Outlook.com users use Skype? Skype is known since a long time, and most people know about its existence. So, some will be tempted to try it, others tried it in the past and will still not use it, and some are even not interested in trying it at all.

Therefore, the growth of concurrent users online is in my humble opinion partially a false growth.