eBay buys Skype for ..WHAT???! ($2.6 BILLION!)

eBay recently purchased Skype for $2.6 billion, and the final price tag might go as high as $4.1 billion. Skype is a voice over IP (VoIP) telephone which allows you to call another Skype user (with your computer and high speed internet connection). Skype is not the only VoIP phone service around. There is also Firefly (an Australian company), AOL's Instant Messenger has one, and Google is reportedly has one in beta testing. There are over currently over 1,000 providers of VoIP service. And VoIP is not new. Back in 1997, I tried the free PGPfone, which was an VoIP phone that encrypted your voice using the RSA encryption scheme (to this day still ahead of its time). So why would eBay buy a product which is hardly unique, for such a absurd amount of money?

Your guess is as good as mine. The net is full of people trying to make sense of it. Several people defend eBay with the logic that "Hey... they have to be up to something big". Others come up with imagined tie-ins to eBay's current business model like:

1. Skype will allow eBay sellers and buyers to talk to each other (Oh...how we all miss haggling via telephone. Answering e-mails and taking calls. that's what we're looking for!)
2. Skype will allow Craigslist users to talk to each other.
3. eBay will offer VoIP telephone servce cheaply. Along with the 1,000's of other vendors who didn't drop $2.6 billion for their software.

But to me, none of these explanations make sense. eBay/Craigslist users could use Skype before the eBay purchase if they had wanted. Your Skype phone number is essentially anonymous. The truth is this: Most people don't want strangers calling them either by telephone or VoIP phone. I don't know about you, but I like the distance that e-mail, etc puts between me and the other psychos out there.

Maybe eBay has something up their sleeve we haven't thought of yet. But the question sill remains, why spend $2.6 billion on something you could have easily built yourself for $100 million (and bought yourself a new Boeing 737 along the way - hey, start eBay Airline!)? You would still have $2,500,000,000 to spend on advertising, buying up small nations, etc. You could have even written a check to the existing 54 million Skype users (who, by the way,provide zero net profit for Skype) to switch over to your product.

It just makes no sense. Skype had projected revenues this year of $60 million but has YET to make a profit. The best answer I can come up with is that Skype has perfected mind control and is about to take over the world. Either that or someone at eBay made a huge mistake with the zeros.