Galitzine Asks “Does EBay Want to be a Phone Company?”
Greg Galitzine is scratching his head over the EBay / Skype rumours as well. Like me, he can’t understand why this makes sense.
While I understand the desire for even a leading company to maintain growth and identify new sources of revenue, but I don’t quite get the marriage of EBay and Skype. One of the unnamed sources in the Journal story said that “eBay was keen on adding services that make it easier to buy and sell goods online, as it did when it acquired the electronic-payment processing service PayPal in 2002.”
Does EBay want to enable buyers to talk to sellers? If that’s even a good idea, why not partner with or simply endorse one of the existing PC to PC VoIP services? Save the $3billion, and maybe take a small piece of each call generated within the EBay universe.
September 8th, 2005 at 2:00 pm
[...] The Ebay/Skype story is really getting legs. News.COM is covering it, including the masterful understatement that "the deal would represent a dramatic shift in strategy for the world’s largest online auction site." Erik Lagerway (www.sipthat.com) also wrote a short piece, with the comment that "If Skype would only just integrate SIP, we could all play." [...]
September 8th, 2005 at 4:03 pm
[...] And for the last word on the Ebay / Skype story, we head to Fark — "Ebay reportedly in talks to buy Skype. Talks fail when at the last second some jerk bids $3,000,000,000.50" [...]
October 3rd, 2007 at 9:00 pm
[...] saunderslog.comGreg Galitzine is scratching his head over the EBay / Skype rumours as well. Like me, he [...]