There’s one thing that everyone seems to be missing in Skype’s valuation. The retention and growth of paying customers is key to any business. Only a small number of Skype’s members actually pay for any services (SkypeOut, SkypeIn, etc.). As any customer who’s ever had a problem with their service knows, Skype’s customer service is terrible. There is no number to call, and the customer service forms are buried in the catacombs of the website. When they finally get back to you (my typical response time is about 5 business days) the answers provided are usually incorrect, incomplete, or skirt the issue (particularly if billing is involved). If you reply, expect another bad response 5 business days later. This kind of nonsense is a huge turnoff to people who actually rely on the service for business.

Skype is dirt cheap, but until they set up a business that actually treats its customers with respect and courtesy they will never attract the client base they need to grow the non-advertising income-producing parts of its business. This being the case, I think the idea of paying $2 billion for Skype is absolute lunacy.

Yes, Ebay made a bad investment, but that’s more to do with what they did (or didn’t) do with it, than it’s intrinsic worth.

The thing with Skype is that there is hardly any infrastructure to rip :-) It’s all software on your (and my) machines. If they push an update, then the whole network could change protocol overnight.

Ripping out the entire underlying infrastructure, which is the special sauce, isn’t cheap or something that occurs quickly. And doing so would likely be a huge disruption to their business.

eBay needs to realize that while Skype is a fantastic service, they got caught in the hype, substantially overpaid and now must live with that.

The storing of data ‘somewhere’ in the cloud of users machines is
ok for casual use, but it fails badly in any environment which has a
regulatory framework for storage of personal data (like most business in the EU
or the US healthcare system).
For Skype to meet those regulatory requirements, they are going to have to
ditch parts of GlobalIndex anyhow.

The p2p discovery stuff is also adequately done by things like Digium’s Dundi protocol.
So JoltID is less of an issue than it appears – at least technically.

that joltid technology is at the core of Skype so it is not a non-issue as you say. it is going to cost them money in my opinion and as a result this could delay the IPO. Give me your breakdown on why it is more expensive at today’s metrics. I might be missing something.