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Ebay Rumored to be Buying Skype
JDStone writes "Rumor has it that trusted sources from The Wall Street Journal say Ebay is interested in buying Skype. Later after the announcment, Ebay Inc. shares fell 4.3 percent."
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will we soon be attending live auctions via skype?
sure, sometimes I would like to look at the sellers face when he says, I didn't test the notebook, but I think it is running fine, but I won't guarantee...
W00t
from the article:
"Whenever a company may do something that's completely different than its historical focus, there is risk,'"
My qyestion is, what would ebay want with VIOP? Paypal and Half.com made sense for ebay to pick up, but I'm just not seeing this at all...
sorry 'bout the mess...
Skype already turned down a billion dollar deal from another company. They're holding on to it.. I'm sure they wont sell to eBay.
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
why would EBay want to buy a peanut butter manufacturer? And if they did want to, I would think Jif would be a more appropriate takeover target.
:-)
Market analysts say (and market analysts are never wrong) that skype "could help eBay quickly improve customer service"
Anyone who's used Paypal know how important "customer service" is to ebay
In all seriousness - as WSJ intimates, automated buyer to seller / buyer to previous buyer / etc VOIP calls, could improve ebay's model of doing business.
My pics.
"Rumor has it that trusted sources from The Wall Street Journal say"
Maybe the submitter has a good grasp of subtle irony?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
One of the nice things about Skype is the strong encryption. The American government is considering legislation to require backdoors in internet telephony. I've lost the link but I saw an interview with the CEO of Skype, asking how they would respond...the CEO simply said that as a company in Luxembourg, he was perfectly free to ignore American legislation, and intended to do so. EBay wouldn't have the same freedom.
Its not uncommon for a company with cash in the bank to buy up unrelated companies to diversify its holdings. Its much like an individual buying a mutual fund, you don't put all your eggs in one basket. Companies like Microsoft do this all the time. They've bought all kinds of seemingly unrelated companies.
Additionally, it could provide a near-turnkey solution for better buyer/seller communication, which could be cool.
From a number of persepectives, it could happen. It just doesn't look like the market approves right now.
Anyone else worried that Skype, if owned by Ebay, would be more likely to bend to the FCC's demands to allow federal wiretapping?
Typically big American corporations like Ebay play ball with the government, and one of Skype's most attractive features (IMO) is that they don't allow wiretapping (the data is encrypted end-to-end).
Ok what to say to this obvious troll.
1st Sherman Networks had nothing to do with Gator.
2nd the music industry is actually doing just fine.
3rd Napster was shut down, they did not "stop".
4th Gator is, as well as being annoying to all hell, not responsible for anyy indentity theft, or criminal action at all.
As for the rest, well since nothing prior to your skype comment had even the hint of truth I feel I can say the rest is also bullshit.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
google advertising during my phone conversations is terrifying.
:-p
Reminds me of when eating at a local "mercado" in Mexico. While you eat several people will try to sell you something(sungalses, garlic, cheap jewelery, T-Shirt from your favorite soccer team, etc...).
The food is great but when your're finished you just want to get away from all that spam!
Didn't PayPal just announce "micro" payments? We might be seeing Skype turn into a real VoIP system here. Not only that, but everyone's been looking at Skype as a vehicle for buyers interacting with sellers -- why not have *both* interact with eBay itself using Skype/POTS? Now, instead of having to have a broadband connection at the ready, you can easily bid/list/track by phone on eBay, just like the more traditional auctions. If the rumours are true, this is the direction I perceive eBay going.
I am posting fairly late in this discussion but, as no-one else has made the following connection, I will put it forward.
The key here is not Ebay but PayPal and their recent repositioning.
Before I go any further, I should mention that I don't believe anyone is going to be paying 10 figures for Skype, that's just ridiculous. From what I've heard, their P2P network is completely unsustainable, with far too few supernodes. If anyone does buy Skype, they will probably do so for the brand and customer base but replace the existing network with a more centralised one.
Skype's brand isn't really such a great catch - it would be quickly superseded if someone offered even a marginally better service - all ownership of the Skype brand would provide is a small head start. Is that worth billions? I don't know but I suspect not.
As for Skype's existing customer base, they say they have 52 million users, which really means 52 million downloads. Of those, only 2 million have ever actually parted with cash to use the Skype-Out feature that allows you to make calls to regular phones.
Now, bear in mind that I am one of those two million - I forget what I paid, probably a $5 minimum charge, just to play with the service for a while, probably used up a dollar or so calling embassies in China for a laugh. In the space of one week I downloaded Skype twice, installing it on 2 different machines to see if I could call myself. I made a grand total of ONE free call to another Skype user, a guy in Canada who posted on the Skype forum, asking for someone to call him so that he could see if Skype worked. I then annoyed a lot of people in China and, having had my fun, abandoned whatever money I had left in my account and uninstalled Skype from both machines.
If I am at all typical of first wave adopters, their active userbase is far, far smaller but they won't publicly release that figure. Ebay, however, will be well aware of it and will negotiate accordingly.
As for paying customers, well, I'm not the only person who's willing to blow a few dollars to play with a shiny new toy but quickly bored by it. How many recurring customers do they have? And how much do you think they spend on average? And how big is Skype's margin on that?
Let's say they have 1 million active paying customers (nonsense, but what the Hell), each of those would have to be valued $100 to make Skype worth a billion. That is about twice the going value of a mobile phone customer. Ridiculous.
So, having established that Skype is worth far less than over-excited journalists would have us believe, let's presume that Skype is actually willing to sell for far, far less. Who, then, would be interested in buying?
Any of the big names could probably harness the initial hype of the sale to their benefit. Yahoo could certainly use the edge against Google and they've swallowed some pretty interesting companies lately in their quest to reinvent themselves. Google knows that and would probably like to take Skype out of Yahoo's reach, but, generally, they prefer to develop their own tech in-house.
Vodaphone could do something really smart with Skype, link their networks in a way that would really blow the other mobile providers out of the water but, from what I know of corporate decision-making, that might be a little too out-of-the-box for a non-Internet company.
Which brings us back to PayPal. Last week, they announced something fairly momentous that was missed by pretty much everyone. After years of holding back the whole idea of micro-payments, they finally decided to granularize their fee scale to make smaller transactions viable. Before, you had to pay 30c + 3% of every transaction, leaving you with 67c from a dollar sale. Now, they are willing to take 5c + 5% instead, leaving you with 90c. This is huge news because it makes viable