eBay-Skype: What Else is There?

I’ve never understood the rationale for the eBay-Skype deal.

And had it occurred to me that immediately after the deal was announced the worm would turn on Skype and people would start seeing Skype as mainstream, well, then even more so. (What I said was “At the first sign of fees for Skype to Skype, the userbase will evaporate and flee to the next entrant to the market.” What I should have added was ‘or at the first sign of it being corporate and therefore less than cool …’ – and doesn’t this anti-mainstream reaction remind you of the treatment Flickr was handed by the digiterati right after the Yahoo deal was announced??)

But back to Skype – Mike at Techdirt sums up the latest reasons to not understand the deal.

Skype is still an amazing app, whether people think the new video beta is revolutionary, or evolutionary, or just incremental. (Honestly, a free app with a great featureset, and it still gets the ‘what have you done for me lately’ treatment!!) But this deal (still) makes no sense.