It just goes to show you...
There's a sucker born every minute.
It’s official - eBay has offloaded a majority stake in Skype to a gaggle of investors in a deal that values the VoIP outfit at $2.75bn. eBay keeps a 35 per cent stake in Skype. The online auction giant will get $1.9bn in cash. eBay offered to buy Skype for $2.6bn in 2005. But when earnouts were included eBay actually paid …
I've shopped around extensively for my calling needs (with a dispersed family I need to call several countries regularly) and Skype is pretty good as far as costs go, and very reliable. I use them along with Sipgate, and I've found the service to be very good overall. Not perfect, but then, what is?
Now, as for the investors being suckers, I'm not a venture capitalist, so I can't judge that one. Surely, if you're a venture capitalist, you must get "it" right more often than not, or you'd be broke, so only time will tell on that one I think.
Having been employed by a company once aquired by Silver Lake Partners (amongst others) then I can expect Skype to get no further funding and to go through some rather drastic cost cutting. Then with a bit of a positive spin they'll flog it off to someone else for lots more money and be laughing all the way to wherever they store all their cash.
Or that's my experience of them, and I'm sure Seagate has suffered along the same lines.