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Skype Suit Better Get Sorted Out
by Andrew McCaskey
Better Get Sorted Out Fast
The lawsuit between the inventors of Skype and eBay, SilverLake Partners and investors better get sorted out quickly. The speed at which the net moves could puncture that revenue balloon in a few months.
It’s extremely hard to believe that the deal several years ago went through without somone questioning the exact details of what was and was not included in the transfer. To have left the technology ownership in question looks like a monumental mistake on the part of Meg Whitman and the eBay management team at that time. And, as I mentioned on air, it appears that the big deal equivalent of Title Insurance is not in play here either.
What is in play is the announcement that all 350 million Facebook users are soon to have access to a realtime VoIP chat client – one to one and one to many. Add to that the Google voice, Google Wave and similar systems that are playing around in the same arena, and Skype’s functional advantage may not be as ironclad as it was only two years ago.
In addition, Twitter and Jajah just announced a way to link Twitter users by phone, passing info through Twitter DM for free two minute calls. Sort of an audio tweet, but realtime and sufficient for many uses.
Along with some recent actions by Skype that seem to have cut the legs out from under an independent developer ecosystem, it looks like some strange decisions are being made in the platform. All that is not building value into the deal. In fact, it’s slipping away minute by minute.
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