Today's Newsweek has a piece on eBay and Skype, noting that this week "At its annual 'eBay Live' convention, the company will announce plans to integrate Skype into its U.S. marketplace for the first time. Sellers can choose to include Skype buttons in their auctions for a few carefully chosen product categories, such as cars, real estate and diamond solitaire rings."
The article begins with an optimistic anecdote suggesting that adding Skype functionality improves the results of big-ticket item sales--although the article also cautions that introducing direct voice connections raises new possibilities for buyers and sellers to conclude their transaction off eBay and avoid fees. Meg Whitman repeats that she sees the big pay-off in the Skype acquisition as synergies with eBay and PayPal.
The broader question that the eBay-Skype deal raises for companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google is this: in the new jungle of P2P and Web 2.0 companies, how can you tell whether you're buying a real company, or just a first-mover startup that's merely a technology that will soon be commoditized? Did eBay really need to spend billions to embed VOIP in their products--especially when they already have a trusted brand name? Wall Street clearly thinks not, and has voted with its feet.
My guess is that the era of big-bucks acquisition of Web 2.0 startups is coming to an end, and we'll see the major players building their own solutions. Yahoo bought Flickr, for example, but decided to revamp their own video hosting instead of acquiring YouTube or a YouTube wannabe. Of course, the majors' solutions won't initially be either as functional or as cool as the first-movers, and traffic and time-on-site will reflect that. But the majors have deep pockets and lots of time, and the Web audience is nothing if not fickle. In the long run, eBay-Skype (and perhaps News Corp-MySpace) may turn out to be case studies in buying commodity goods at luxury prices.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-12-2006 @ 11:36AM
John Naum said...
Skype sucks.
6-12-2006 @ 11:40AM
Tracy Riggs said...
I'm glad that you mentioned and cautioned about that when Skype is implemented into eBay that people can by pass eBay when making transactions. lol.
However this sort of thing is already going on wide-spread without Skype. lol... Sellers of big ticket items and car dealers already list their phone numbers and address in their listing.( Anyone can contact them)
People will bid on a car or other big ticket item, they are told reserve price has not been met. They then call the seller or dealer to see what the reserve is or was.(Dealers always start low) After talking to the seller, that person stops bidding. The seller and buyer have contacted each other and a sale has already been made.
eBay only receives the listing fee.
Not bad for exposure world-wide on auto sales or big ticket items, right? lol...
Once seller and buyer talk before the auction ends, a sale is made without using eBay. The seller saves final value cost.
This sort of thing is already happening. Skype is just going to make it worse lol...
Buying Skype for this purpose was a very bad move on Meg's part. It will be a disaster in my opinion. It will cost them Millions more in sales. End of Auction Fees they will never collect....