In an article onBusinessWeek.com titled Ebay’s Skype Bubble Bursts the author talks to the failure and major shuffles at Skype over the past week.
It looks like Skype just ain’t doing what Ebay thought it would do – grow, make losts of money and seamlessly and synergistically meld with PayPal and the Ebay auction site. It looks as if this is not happening and that the competition is stiff out there – you got google, msn, yahoo etc all offering their own free versions of phone calls.
And their saddest piece of news was that the SkypeOut minutes were remaining flat. In other words people are not flocking to Skype as a way of making call from computer to a normal phone number. This is not hard to believe – the quality still doesn’t rival your regular phone.
Sometimes I think we have gone backwards on our telephone quality – copper lines give such nice clean sound, then next comes cell phones, followed by proper VOIP systems, and then at the bottom are the free online VOIP systems. I still like picking up my regular land line and making a call.
I guess this is what happens when everything gets shook up by new technologies – we get flooded with mediocrity; best thing to do is wait for the good fish to float to the surface!!
Well, I did feel bad for the two co-founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis and several of the other early investors who expected to get $1.7 billion if everything had gone as projected, instead they are looking at having to share only half a billion dollars. What a bummer!!!
So, we wait and see what Ebay does. Maybe some of these companies (like google with youtube) will start shedding some of these assets at bargain basement prices. Could soon be a good time to go shopping. Haa, Haa!!
Happy phone calls!!
