4 ms·
EBay Will Sell Skype: Report
- icky 19y agoThis whole "buying and selling" thing is clearly outside of eBay's area of expertise...
- angstrom 19y agoBecoming 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.
- Emmjaykay 19y agoI dunno. I like my Skype account. Good for calling home. At the office we use it to communicate with our offices in Europe.
- angstrom 19y agoLiking 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.
- Emmjaykay 19y agoYeah, 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. :)
- volida 19y agoI dont understand what you mean. Already VOIP is cost effective, and already you can make cheaper phone calls from a landlines/mobile through VOIP biapassing the normal cost.
- attack 19y agoSkype is huge throughout Europe. US, yes barely exists.
- LPTS 19y agoI 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.
- schtog 19y agobut arent they making money?
- wanorris 19y agoEBay 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.
- attack 19y agoMore 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.