Thursday, September 03, 2009

eBay sell Skype

Is almost four years later, eBay finally sell Skype to a group of investor lead by Silver Lake, other investment venture include a new venture by Marc Andreessen. eBay sell 65% Skype share for about $2 billion, which is a good price, compare with 2.6 billion acquire price in year 2005.

eBay want to sell Skype for a long time, there are rumors saying that Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom wanted to buy back Skype. It seems like a wrong for eBay, because after 4 years time, Skype doesn't really help eBay sales. When eBay buy Skype, eBay thought that their users may use Skype platform to discuss the buy/sell transaction.

Skype is a good product, when Skype first launched it was very popular for its good voice quality stream over through the Internet. Skype not just run on Windows, Mac and Linux desktop platform, it also run on mobile like Windows Mobile, Symbian and iPhone.

Skype has added other services including Skype in and Skype out (online number), so user can use Skype to dial a normal phone number, or receive call from a normal phone number (Skypein).

Skype is a very potential software platform and service, I think it just lack of a good lead. Skype have more competitors like Google Talk and voice chat from instant messenger.

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