Why serious IP techies don't "get" eBay-Skype

The Fall 2005 Von show starts in earnest today here in Boston. Yes, that was room service with breakfast..

Last night at the opening reception, I asked a cross-section of workaday (as opposed to visionary) techies what they think about eBay buying Skype.

To a person, they all said: "huh?"

"Huh" as in, yea they have heard about it..but what's the deal here.

Being trained as a sociologist, I immediately assigned two reasons for this line of thought:

The eBay-Skype deal is not a technology deal. It is a marketing and ecommerce deal. Marketing and e-commerce strategies are alien concepts to people more concerned about the plumbing that makes IP Telephony work.

There's more than just a Venus-Mars difference between the tech and marketing mindsets. Venus-Oort Cloud would be more like it.

Also, I gotta tell you, among this crowd there's a good bit of snobbiness toward Skype. Jealousy is part of it, sure, but so much of the VoIP world that shows up at this show is enterprise-solutions centric. Skype is seen by them as a consumer brand, irrelevant to their business models and just not worth the mental bandwidth thinking about.

Can you spell.. L-I-N-E-A-R? Guess math, programming and network geniuses are that way.