Today felt like a flashback to the dot.com era of yesteryear…Skype announced it was being bought for USD $2.6b ($1.3b in cash and $1.3b in stock) and an additional USD $1.5b in performance bonuses by eBay. Downloadable preso [PDF, 78 pages, 3.5mb]
Skype has three main assets – users, brand name and networking gear. eBay has a great brand name and a ton of users as well. Skype probably has $200m-300m in networking gear, make that $500m-600m for those blue Cisco boxes. It would seem more cost effective for eBay to have built their own VoIP platform from the ground up. Google released their new VoIP platform just a couple of weeks ago and my guess is if eBay screws with the Skype community we’ll ALL jump ship to Google Talk. Anyways, congrats to the two founders of Skype, Niklas and Janus. They just bagged a deal that most people thought would never happen at such crazy valuations.
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