On: Ebay Unacquires StumbleUpon

[TravisLS]

I'm not sure what eBay was planning on doing with StumbleUpon in the first place. Same with Skype - it's been three years seemingly without any real integration of the services.

I recall talk about a grand vision of users calling one-another to negotiate deals and terms, but it looks like eBay has never really pulled the trigger. Perhaps they're trying to stay in a league with Google and Amazon, who have shown significant versatility in their service offerings - but eBay has definitely fallen flat if that was their intention.

I wouldn't be surprised to see eBay spin off Skype eventually too in favor of a leaner organization.

[briansmith → TravisLS]

Maybe their plan wasn't so much integration as it was diversification.

[sachinag → briansmith]

The plan was to mask a deceleration in growth of the main eBay platform while they bought time to fix it. Whoops.

[bdr → briansmith]

Not true. They explicitly planned for integration in much the way GP describes.