OK, this will be in every telco blog in the next 2 hours, but I just did a quick scan and it’s not yet posted in the usual suspects blogs, so I thought I’d get a bit of pleasure from scooping it here.
The pundits will analyse this to death, so I’ll be brief. Here’s what I wrote to a friend last week on my thoughts:
This would be a marked departure for ebay, it’s not synergistic, it would be them moving into a new market / business. I just don’t see a huge market in ebay’ers calling each other to ask questions about items being sold. But, it would give Ebay a big new thing to drive paypal adoption, which seemed to stall when eBay acquired Paypal a few years back. Ebay’s problem is that, well, that it is eBay. People associate it with auctioning stuff, and that’s how they think of themselves. They ought to build an umbrella meta brand, that holds eBay, Skype, and Paypal