I just don’t get it.
Maybe I’m not seeing something that those wacky eBay managers see, but this seems to be totally out of the market that eBay has conquered. PayPal makes sense. Shopping.com makes sense. Skype — well, someone needs to lay out the plan for me, because, again, I just don’t get it.
As a comparison, Oracle bought Siebel for $5.8 billion. You know, Siebel, that huge CRM company that has pretty much owned that market for a while. That makes sense, because it fits Oracle’s business, and could integrate weill with their applications.
But Skype? $2.6 billion? $1.3 billion more than what they paid for PayPal? Skype claims 54 million subscribers, most of them overseas, but I can’t see most buyers and sellers using Skype to communicate. I would think most of them would rather use a regular telephone, at least until VOIP technology doesn’t drop because of latency issues.
And why would I use it when email works just as well for communications between eBay parties?
