
EBay Will Sell Skype: Report - sant0sk1
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/18/ebay-will-sell-skype-report/
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icky
This whole "buying and selling" thing is clearly outside of eBay's area of
expertise...

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angstrom
Becoming a phone company was never in their best interests. VOIP has been
looking for the killer app for 10 years. Unfortunately, everyone who does it
winds up competing on cost.

Why? Because the telephone has had over 100 years of innovation. So every VOIP
company recreates the wheel and sells it for less than the telcos or PBX
companies by making it free or almost free. In the end cellphones will win
out. The only thing people seem to care about VOIP for is games. The rest of
the time they're just as likely to pick up a cell phone or land line.

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Emmjaykay
I dunno. I like my Skype account. Good for calling home. At the office we use
it to communicate with our offices in Europe.

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angstrom
Liking Skype and Skype being profitable on the scale neccessary to justify its
acquisition price are two different venues.

The goal of skype was to empower the eBay users and drive more users to eBays
core auction business. It never materialized. The probelm is that VoIP
services have a tendency to try and compete by being free or near free. It's
not that there is no cost associated with the technology, but that's the
easiest, least creative way to pull customers.

VoIP is evolutionary not revolutionary. They treated it as something
revolutionary and made a messy business acquisition that was far outside their
realm of expertise.

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Emmjaykay
Yeah, ebay + skype seemed silly at the time. Right now it is like $3 a month
for me. Even if it was $20 - $30 I still would like it. :)

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schtog
but arent they making money?

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wanorris
EBay is having trouble with their core operations. Whether Skype is profitable
or not (I assume they are), since it has nothing to do with their core
auctions business, EBay wants to get rid of it to focus on more important
issues.

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attack
More of a situation where they know that other companies could make a lot more
money with skype, so why not sell skype to them and make a bigger profit than
ebay could by holding onto skype?

It's all money.

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LPTS
I was always told a company should eat it's own dogfood so to speak, so I'll
look forward to bidding on skype at auction.

