EBay Will Sell Skype: Report
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Why? Because the telephone has had over 100 years of innovation. So every VOIP company recreates the wheel and sells it for less than the telcos or PBX companies by making it free or almost free. In the end cellphones will win out. The only thing people seem to care about VOIP for is games. The rest of the time they're just as likely to pick up a cell phone or land line.
The goal of skype was to empower the eBay users and drive more users to eBays core auction business. It never materialized. The probelm is that VoIP services have a tendency to try and compete by being free or near free. It's not that there is no cost associated with the technology, but that's the easiest, least creative way to pull customers.
VoIP is evolutionary not revolutionary. They treated it as something revolutionary and made a messy business acquisition that was far outside their realm of expertise.
Already VOIP is cost effective, and already you can make cheaper phone calls from a landlines/mobile through VOIP biapassing the normal cost.
It's all money.