"eBay had hoped to use Skype to facilitate communication between auction buyers and sellers when it purchased the business in 2005 for a current total of $3.1 billion", according to Colin Sebastian, analyst with Lazard Capital Markets."The synergies they had hoped to achieve have not materialized," he said, and a spinoff makes sense since "eBay is fighting hard to turn around its core business."
Read the whole story here: Ebay Plans to Spin Off Skype
Now this got me thinking...does anyone besides Oprah and Jimmy Fallon really use Skype? I mean, I have not met one person who uses it or swears by it. So who are these 400 million users? And if Skype is such a great company, why did Ebay write down $900 million off them last year and is putting them up for sale now? Makes you wonder. Speaking of company's that are not making money, Twitter, while all the rage and currently up to 8 millions users worldwide, is also not making any money. See the story here, Twitter: Buzz first, Profits later.
Twitter strikes me as a company that is capitalizing off a fad and hoping that someone like Google will see value in them and buy them for millions of dollars and make their founders very wealthy. At this point, while they are gaining traction, I see Facebook as the true leader in this type of social networking platform. Time will tell of course. Well, I need to think of something clever to Tweet to my followers!
2 comments:
yep, we use Skype at work. Swear by it. It's great-- you get instant answers, especially when multi-tasking (e.g. conference calls).
Use it all the time...use it for chat, sending big files, conference calls, and talking to people in foreign countries. however their business model is another thing!
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