I'm sure that other eyebrows besides mine raised when hearing the news yesterday that eBay has purchased Skype for $2.6 billion. That's a huge chunk of change. Full Story (Infoworld).
The general concensus seems to be that there is some validity to enhancing the communication between buyers and sellers, but $2.6 billion worth of validity? Is eBay going to benefit $2.6 billion worth? It's not immediately obvious, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
I have read two very good arguments about why Skype may not be as popular for buyer / seller communication as eBay may hope. Issue number one is presence--that both the buyer and seller must be available at the same time to talk to each other (unlike email, where they can exchange messages at their convenience). Secondly, communicating via voice is much more personal than email, and International sellers / buyers may not be nearly as comfortable speaking in a non-native language as they are emailing.
One other thing lingering on my mind is if eBay's owning Skype might cause some users to be more skeptical of Skype than otherwise. eBay is big business, there's no denying that--and some people, myself included, may wonder about not-yet-revealed ulterior motives. Again, time will tell.
Agreed. PayPal is garbage ever since eBay snatched it up. Tried using the PayPal Web Services SDK lately? Tried deciphering the worthless documentation? It's so worthless that I couldn't even use anything included in the SDK. I had to write my own routines. Why is it a pile of so much crap? Because there's no realistic competition.
Why eBay would want to buy Skype for $2.6 billion is beyond me but it most certainly is for no good. There's no way it's simply to enhance eBay. That's just ridiculous. They have something up their sleeve. I have no empirical evidence but I can smell that eBay believes they have an opportunity to corner some sort of market. I just know it.