I’m up very early this morning as my cold from the past week continues to cause me frustration. I decided to take an opportunity to check e-mail and whatnot before I try to get an hour or two more sleep before going into the office, when what should pop into my e-mail in-box but an alert from the Wall Street Journal that eBay are in talks to acquire Instant Message/VoIP software company Skype. I thought this was worthy of a quick blog entry.
The article points out that the talks are in a very sensitive phase and could potentially fall apart, so nothing is set in stone. Either way, the fact that eBay is involved in these talks at all is a very interesting development. This seems like a strategy right out of right field and only tangentially related to eBays core competency– and only then if you use a lot of imagination and perhaps drink a lot of hard liquor. The Journal points out that eBays core revenue is reaching a likely plateau, so maybe this is a good strategy for diversification.
One thing I do hope eBay doesnt do, for their own stake, is overpay for Skype. Theres been a lot of hype about the market capitalization of Skype and likely suitors, one such rumour indicating that News Corp. was considering offering $2 billion for Skype. Granted Skype has a large base of downloads and has made impressive inroads into an already very crowded market for instant message software, but some studies have indicated that usage for the service on a per user basis has gone down significantly as the user population has grown. Perhaps Skype has yet to reach a tipping point in terms of penetration, but Im of the opinion that its potential as a platform for ad-based revenue (which is where I would see eBay going should it acquire Skype) is somewhat limited unless eBay could find a way to make Skype sticky for those people who download it.
