Or is this the first stage to Skype becoming irrelevant and/or neutered? Or is this a genius move on eBay's part? Only time will tell. All I know is that I don't use eBay (too complicated to buy and sell and eBay owns all your data and it doesn't have fit and polish of Apple, if you are going to be locked in, it might as well be in an Apple-like beautiful, stylish prison :-) !)

From The Jeff Pulver Blog: End of an Era? eBay to purchase Skype.:

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Just in a flash, Skype has become the "engine" for eBay customers to communicate with each other. An interesting business model. I'll leave it at that.

What I find to be more interesting is that the basic element of Skype "needing" to be disruptive to the world's communication service providers seemed to have been lifted.

There is a part of me that wonders if the World's telcos got together and gave eBay the money to purchase Skype so that wouldn't have to worry about being disrupted. As a friend says, "there is more truth said in jest than in fiction."

So what exactly is eBay purchasing other than some pretty cool P2P technology, a great brand and access to two of the best minds to hit the internet and market disruptive innovations who have a track record of taking a vision and turning it into a reality?

I'm afraid only the shareholders of eBay will find out.

Until recently, I never looked at Skype as an "ecommerce play." I'm not sure who did. One question that comes to mind is why eBay didn't decide on launching their own SIP service and build their own softclient to optimize the eBay/Paypal end user experience?

Oh well, looks like the market for enabling end-to-end IP Communications (between end-users not looking to do ecommerce) is going to be wide open again.

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