Mass hysteria? It's not like Skype's died. It's just a really bad hangover

Of the million or so I told you so's that have already been written regarding eBay's confession that it might not get the return on its investment in Skype that it originally thought it would, I like Nicholas Carr's the best. Carr reflected on the words of eBay Meg Whitman who was answering questions regarding the wisdom in eBay's acquisition of the VoIP revolutionary and without cutting and pasting the entire post here, I thought Whitman's most foreshadowing words were:

If you have the largest ecosystem, then you will be the one who will actually figure out the long-term monetization model ... And we already have some ideas.

She said "ideas." Not "plans." But rather, "ideas." She also hinted that you (in other words "eBay") will be the one to figure it out. In other words, it wasn't figured out already.

Whitman went on to say they had a number of trials in place. Usually, when you see big acquisitions like this, the chief executive of the acquirer has some really clear plans for the acquiree. There isn't much figuring out to do. Sometimes these plans are communicated to the public (eg: Larry Ellison is usually pretty clear on the efficacy of Oracle's acquistions) and other times not (Google's acquisitions are a bit of an enigma). But it's pretty clear that when eBay acquired Skype for US$2.6 billion, eBay executives weren't exactly sure. Carr's own translation of Whitman's words went like this:

If we buy it, the money will come. Or: If we don't buy it, the money will go to one of our competitors.

Hindsight is of course 20/20. Most self-respecting public relations firms are probably looking at this case study right now (thanks to Nick Carr pointing out the history) and making a Top Ten list of things that executives shouldn't say at an acquisition press conference. Meanwhile, us members of the press are thinking, "The next time someone says 'ideas' or 'figure out' in the context of an acquisition announcement, it's time to hang on like a pit bull to see if there's anything but air there."

All this said, it isn't like Skype is dead and the obituary needs to be written. Anything but. Let's not forget that, like the MP3 player business, in the highly friction-oriented VoIP business, Skype was and still is like iTunes and iPod. Skype was the first one to really take the pain out of international VoIP and still is the one to beat. Not only does Skype have the global footprint that other telephony providers dream of, it also has a thriving ecosystem that stands alone.

Call it serendipity. I was reminded of this fact when, yesterday, in the midst of all the Skype news and commentary flowing through my RSS river, the Fedex guy showed up at my door and delivered a box containing IPEVO's new SOLO Skype Desktop Phone for review. When companies like IPEVO are making hardware that's dedicated to some sort of online service, that's a sign of an ecosystem that we won't be writing the obituary of anytime soon. How many other online services have something like that? (By the way, I'd some sort of device that's devoted to navigation of Google Reader and GMail.) Not many. And it's not like IPEVO is alone. Earlier this year, while at CES, it felt like I couldn't spit without hitting some company making some thing for Skype.

What I didn't see was that same sort of ecosystem presence for the public VoIP services by AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google -- companies with far more resources than Skype ever had when it rose to stardom. Now, with eBay behind it and clearly looking to make something of it, it's not like we should be writing Skype off any time soon (not that Carr did this, but others did). OK. eBay needs to write-off its investment in Skype. Talk about yer' bad hangovers. But does that mean we as users should be writing Skype the service off any time soon? I think not. Take two aspirin. Like all hangovers, this one will pass.