
EBay to sell Skype to investment group including Andreesen Horowitz - rms
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/technology/companies/01ebay.html?_r=1
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andreyf
Ouch. Sorry to kick a dead horse, but I'm not sure what exactly EBay was
thinking when they bought it... solving fraud by letting people talk to each
other? Really? I suppose it's something which might have seemed good in a
meeting of people none of whom cared much about thinking it through.

~~~
adamt
Part of the drivers for eBay was that Skype was at the time (apparently)
responsible for something like 90% of paypal signups (especially outside of
established markets like the US).

I think they were worried that if Skype had been purchased by Google, and they
switched to using Google Checkout rather than paypal, that they would have
lost a lot of market share.

~~~
andreyf
Wow, 90% seems like a lot... although I can't seem to find a source for that.
According to an answer on Amazon's askville [1], the total ended up being
~1.7% around Oct 2006.

At one time, the life cycles of the companies might have aligned (as Skype was
taking off, and Paypal was plateauing) to show ridiculous numbers like that.
Still, it seems hardly justifiable to pay billions to buy a company just
because they use your service for checking out.

[http://askville.amazon.com/users-Paypal-
Skype/AnswerViewer.d...](http://askville.amazon.com/users-Paypal-
Skype/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=124573)

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ars
Why do they they say it was such a bad deal? $900 million yearly on $3 billion
seems quite good to me.

Edit: Er, $600, $900 was the writedown.

~~~
immad
900m revenue or profit?

The article only mentioned Skype "is on track to take in more than $600
million in revenue this year."

If Skype is a low margin business than the profits might be very low. Given
that they have such competitive pricing I can't imagine they have that high a
margin.

~~~
pclark
wasn't it designed to be low overheads? eg: the P2P system for bandwidth, over
having to pay their own server infrastructure.

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muriithi
EBay wants $2B for a company they bought at $3.1B four years ago? They might
as well have taken the "billions" that the NSA was rumored to have offered in
return for being able to eavesdrop on skype calls ;)

See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=522092>

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riffic
Skype is a dead end technology anyways. Go open or go away.

edit: and just to give some 'meat' for the downvoters, Jingle is being built
as a true open p2p voice and video signalling, without being restricted to a
proprietary protocol or walled-garden service:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingle_(protocol)>

And then there's SIP.

~~~
GeneralMaximus
What alternative do you suggest? It should work flawlessly on Windows, Linux
and OS X, and work well even on 128kbps connections. It should work from
behind routers and firewalls, and not turn my Mac into a flaming piece of
plastic.

Well?

~~~
riffic
your mac has ichat.

~~~
GeneralMaximus
Yes, but I regularly need to talk to people who use Windows or Linux.

~~~
riffic
good thing ichat supports a cross platform protocol like SIP then!

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arfrank
I see this as a step in the direction for Skype to move towards IPO, otherwise
it doesn't make sense that any VCs would be willing to invest in it.

As I see it, take a profitable company, with 600M in revenue, spend some time
destructing and reworking it internally while private (possibly launching new
features), then make it public so the VCs get their money back.

