Michael Wolff: Skype Lives!

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks)
Date: November 4, 2009 12:43:39 PM EST
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Michael Wolff: Skype Lives!

[Note:  This item comes from friend John McMullen.  DLH]

From: "John F. McMullen" <johnmac13 () gmail com>
Date: November 4, 2009 8:29:23 AM PST
To: "John F. McMullen" <johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com>
Cc: Commonweal Mailing List <commonweal () yahoogroups com>, Dewayne  
Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Subject: Michael Wolff: Skype Lives!

From NewUser -- <http://www.newser.com/off-the-grid/post/325/skype-lives.html?utm_source=otg&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20091104 
>

Skype Lives!
by Michael Wolff

I follow entrepreneurial dramas the way other people follow sports  
(did somebody win the World Series?). In these comedies, tragedies, or  
farces, people really do rise beyond human limitations or get  
ignominiously crushed. Sometimes there are second chances.  
Entrepreneurs—true entrepreneurs—pride themselves, like none-too- 
bright boxers, on their ability to take a punch. But there aren’t too  
many second chances.

Not like the second chance that is unfolding right now.

Among the greatest pieces of communications technology in our age of  
great communications technology, and hence, when it became the victim  
of corporate synergistic turpitude, the greatest failure, is Skype.

I still can’t get over Skype. When I’m feeling low I think of it. It’s  
like free food—the ability to make free phone calls. And it’s free  
phone calls with video. The picture phone has been the grail of  
communications since the dawn of telecommunications time and suddenly  
it arrived and it was free. Skype is the true community and social  
networking technology. Skype is the broadcast medium of the future.  
Skype is the quantum leap forward of time and space.

So imagine the pain, indeed the existential madness, its founders,  
Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, must have felt when they sold Skype  
to eBay in 2005 and eBay, which shortly came to regret the $2.6  
billion it paid for the company, let it languish. EBay did nothing,  
except bicker with the company’s founders, who were still managing the  
company (and argue over payouts and bonuses). Skype became a  
technology that existed without development or strategy.

As so often happens, the buyers and the entrepreneurial sellers came  
to hate each other. When eBay finally decided to sell Skype earlier  
this year for $1.9 billion, it seemed to take special pleasure in not  
selling it back to its founders even though theirs was arguably the  
better deal.

That’s when the fireworks began. As so often happens when a large  
company buys technology from entrepreneurs who have created it, eBay  
didn’t understand what it was buying. Actually, in this instance, they  
failed to realize they hadn’t really even bought the technology they  
were now selling.

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