Shocker - eBay decides Skype NOT worth how much?

I can't say I'm at all surprised to hear that eBay has decided Skype wasn't exactly worth the $2.4 billion it paid for it two years ago. You don't say - I just wish some of these guys would come talk to me because if I could get just one penny for every dollar I save them I'd be more than happy.

I mean just what were they thinking? Everyone and his cat knows that while VoIP is very cool it is also notoriously hard to substitute for the phone - even I, a relative tech god in the tech world, had to get a new fancy VoIP aware router, mess with firewalls and do all kinds of tricks to get it working well. And those who know their stuff know that Skype is a proprietary closed system that is less open than your regular phone system.

And even I could tell you that really auction customers just don't want to talk to each other - that's exactly why we are selling online. Talking to random people sucks - random people who call are strange, rude and obnoxious - everyone else just gets on with it and follows the rules. Email is fine for that, anything else is a pain in the butt to deal with and auction people know that.

If Skype wants to get more people using their service they would do like Gizmo have done and create a cellphone application that doesn't try to do processor intensive VoIP on your phone, it just starts two VoIP calls - one from them to the caller, and one to the callee and connects them together on their network. This is a great deal for international calling - something that most cellphone companies make horrendously expensive. If I call the UK from my mobile it costs me at least a buck a minute - almost every VoIP company worth its salt can do that with two VoIP calls for under $0.10 a minute so most of the time, within my plan minutes, that's all I'd have to pay.

The thing is Google already figured this out and has been doing it for their Google local advertisers to connect them with customers - eventually the gPhone will roll, with their own 700Mhz bandwidth and Meraki local WiFi access and Skype will be kissing good bye to their $90 million a quarter profit. Remember the more successful Skype is in gaining customers the less they will make. At over 200 million claimed users they already have 1/30th of the worlds population and probably 1/10th of the eligible customers so it is hardly surprising that a huge volume of their traffic will be internetwork calls that are free. They had better start figuring out how to monetize all those internetwork calls right away or kiss their profits googlebye!