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.

Jeffrey Bewkes, president of Time Warner, told his Sports Illustrated magazine division to go take a flying leap when they wanted to partner with AOL's sports channel to build a giant sports web site. Synergies, he told the Wall Street Journal, are bullshit.

As someone who made part of her career not just believing in synergies but putting solid numerical values to them and offering them up, like holy sacraments of PowerPoint, to the strategists at gigantic corporations: this is a hard pill to swallow. And though I see it not working more often than not, I also see so many areas -- yes, within Time Warner, where I work today -- where it does work. Heck, everyday I make my bucks on the back of the synergy.

But instead of calling them "synergies," now, Time Warner is calling them "adjacencies." Sumner Redstone split up Viacom and CBS because the "clout" he was supposed to get from his company's huge size "got us nowhere." Is the day of the synergy over and done with?