Who's to say that not buying Skype will help Google in the long run?

we'll never know...

Suffering? Buying Skype would've been a bad move for the company, and the forces of rationality won out.

From the article, I only detected scheming and FUD, not rational decision making.

The "scheming and FUD" were used to get the company to make a rational decision. Their motivation wasn't to fuck anyone over, it was to get the deciders to make the right decision. There's nothing wrong with hacking deciders to get them to make good decisions; the alternative seems to be letting them make bad ones.

What techniques, specifically, should they have used to get their point across?

  > There's nothing wrong with hacking deciders
  > to get them to make good decisions

This assumes:

1. You are always right.

2. The deciders are a bunch of idiots.

If they trust you, and you deceive them, then maybe neither?

Which side was wrong or right is not the issue with "big company atherosclerosis." The issue is the very fact that parties now feel that decision-making requires deception and FUD. That's a clear sign that there is some serious dysfunction.

I'd offer that the it would have gotten Google zillions of video conferencing clients and a leg up on implementing that into their VOIP style offering. Instead, we're looking at Microsoft struggling to fit into an online platform that has almost no users. Now, if they integrate more Skype functionality into their Office suite, that could be interesting.

Corporate clients wouldn't use skype just because google started using it. They sure as hell would if Microsoft started using it, though.