Gasp - Ebay buys Skype

[lovingboth]

... for between 2.6 and 4.1 billion dollars. (The actual price depends on future performance)

That's a minimum of forty million times Skype's forecast earnings this year (371 million times last year's actual earnings!)

I know Ebay is rich (it made $371 million dollars profit last quarter) but for a business that's not that hard to get into and for which Skype does have lots of users but is not in a dominant position in the way that Ebay is for online auctions and which has Google gunning for it... gosh.

Comments

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

This may be partly about eBay protecting it from Google, of course.

[jenny-gould.livejournal.com]

To think, if I had actually developed my business to do VoIP like I tried / wanted to, I might now be worth $4 billion. Hum ho.

[lovingboth]

Indeed. It's like Ebay itself - they don't do anything particularly clever, they just got lucky early.