EBay paid too much for Skype October 8, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Community , trackbackGood news for those of us who held out against the movement towards skype as a platform for internet discussions. The great promise of skype was to enable people who like telephones to carry on using something in the same way, whilst pretending it’s got something to do with online community and web2.0. It hasn’t. The whole point of the eBay marketplace is that it’s asysnchronous and searchable, which of course telephone chats are not.
eBay says it paid almost $1bn too much for Skype
eBay has admitted it paid far too much when it bought internet telephony company Skype for $2.6bn (£1.28bn) in 2005.
The web auction company said it was writing down the value of Skype. It is also paying $530m to several former Skype shareholders including founder Niklas Zennstrom, who is stepping down as chief executive.
This payout is significantly less than the $1.7bn that eBay could have handed over to former shareholders if Skype had hit various targets. When it bought the business in September 2005, eBay claimed it would integrate its web telephony services with its own online auction site.
Analysts speculated that buyers and sellers could use Skype to contact eBay customer services or talk to each other. This could have encouraged more people to use Skype.
The idea of reproducing the telephone network as a substitute for asynchronous computer enabled communications was always a retrograde step, a non starter. Use Skype to save a few pounds when you would have used expensive international phone services to call your relatives or colleagues overseas. Don’t use it to short-circuit community discussions or to invite favoured individuals into a subset of the conversation. Some people enjoy having the opportunity to talk at others, but that doesn’t anybody really wants to let themselves in for listening to sound of their voices for an extended period with no fixed end and no useful record of what was said.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
I agree that it is better to keep these online discussions “out here in the open” where people can search them out in the future, refer to them and use them to learn from. This is an age of many to many networked communication and learning.
Yes that’s true, Till some days before, skype was used for just a discussion and people were having good time on it, but the use was too limited, now a days lot of professionals are using this, it can be used for online meetings as well.
The Skype has created revolution, its easy to use and we can talk to the person anywhere in the world in less prize. I think ebay has great use thats why they are paying that much cost.