Skype Sale finally complete

Big surprise Ebay managed to sell Skype off in 2009 for a whopping $1.9 Billion in cash. When they first bought Skype I was wondering what they were thinking. I really couldn’t see any synergy between Ebay and Skype. As a former Ebay seller I can tell you that the main convenience of Ebay was that you could post your item on Ebay and just communicate through email. That way you could respond on your own time, rather than waiting for a Skype call from a potential buyer.

Seriously what Ebay seller would really to correspond with customers via Skype when they could simply do everything through email? Seems like making someone wait buy the “phone” to receive a Skype call would just add to the overhead of the company and make things more expensive. Let’s face it the target market of Ebay is people looking to save as much money as possible – so this is not a good thing at all. What was Meg Whitman thinking???

One thing good about Skype is the unlimited calling plans. They are awesome. Not only do you get three incoming numbers from anywhere in the world but you also get a Skype-to-go number. This is actually pretty useful because you can use this number like a calling card gateway. What this means if you have an unlimited calling plan to say North America and you live in the UK your Skype-to-go number will be a local UK number. You can call this number from a landline or cellphone and you get a dialtone allowing you to make outgoing calls. So if you have a North America calling plan you can call any North American number for free (it’s part of your plan) and you only pay local rates.  Pretty useful feature, and I hope this doesn’t disappear when the new owners take over.

Speaking about the new owners, I read part of the group of investors is the Canadian pension plan. I really hope these guys will have a silent investor approach…the last thing Skype needs is some big government bureaucracy stuffing up any future innovative ideas it might develop.