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Monday, October 01, 2007
Henry Blodget outlines how Skype has bombed and thinks maybe they should offload the asset to a company that gets it.
Well, I don't know. From a financial standpoint, Skype is clearly a failure on paper compared to some near-term targets that were set. But then again so were many telecommunications giants as they larded on debt, got reduced to junk bond status in some cases, before (sometimes) gaining powerful monopolistic advantages and turning the corner.
One of the key benefits of acquiring this popular technology - aside from the stated official synergies with eBay's business - turned out to be that it kept Google out of the "Skype business" a little longer. Google was doing a pretty bad job of succeeding at the "YouTube business," recall, so they just acquired YouTube. Problem solved.
Users in my circle of communicators are actually being pulled away from other IM applications towards Skype, because of the quality of its features on chat alone, to say nothing of it being the app of choice for many phone calls.
No doubt Google would *want* to take Skype off someone's hands at this point. Which is good reason to sell it, or good reason to hang onto it? Selling Skype now would only compound eBay's error, if indeed it was an error.
The biggest reason to (eventually) sell Skype is that it is non-strategic to eBay's business. Are they really in the communications field or building a kind of overarching dashboard of web functionality (as Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo are trying to do), or is this just sort of surface-level synergy?
So yes, I agree with Henry that these companies are a much more logical fit for Skype. eBay risks bombing again if they sell too hastily, though.Labels: skype
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
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D'oh!
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