Yesterday, eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) announced that the co-founder and chief executive of its Skype division, Niklas Zennstrom , was stepping down, and that eBay would take $1.43 billion in charges for the internet phone division. Of that, $900 million will be a write-down in the value of Skype, what's called an impairment charge. The rest, $530 million, is payment for certain shareholders to settle future obligations.

Well, well, well. It seems that eBay had finally caught on. Hadn't investors been saying the $2.6 billion Skype acquisition in October 2005 was overvalued from all along?

While Skype was profitable the last two quarters, its contribution to eBay's top line was abysmal considering it was one of three legs eBay was counting on in its Power of Three strategy. The other two being the online auction business, or market place, and PayPal, the online payment service. For 2006, Skype contributed $194 million to eBay's near $6 billion revenue, that's about 3.2%. To give you an idea, market place contributed $4.3 billion and PayPal $1.4 billion. In the first six months of 2007, Skype did better and contributed $168 million or 4.7% to eBay's total revenue of $3.6 billion. Better, and certainly growing nicely (over 100% year-over-year growth), but still a far cry from what it should be considering the price paid.