There are some interesting facts around the Skype acquisition by eBay:
* I wonder if the billions of this acquisition would account to Luxemburg's GDP. If it does, Luxemburg's GDP just grew 5% for this year with this acquisition (35 Billion $ according to Wikipedia). I wonder how much taxes will flow in Luxemburg for the period. Luxemburg already tops the GDP per capita list (before getting an instant 5% raise !)
* It seems that even with a highly successfull product, it seems impossible to create a lasting european company in the Internet Business. The US gorilla's have way too much money and can swallow any company, anytime. Skype's acquisition has been done for 2.5% of eBay stock and a significant amount of eBay's cash reserves (1B$ out of what seems to be reservers of around 2.5B$).
* A company that made 7M$ last year was sold for 2.6B$ ! My previous company was sold 15M$ for 7M$ revenue (ok we where not planning to do 10x this amount the next year !)
* These guys could have gone to jail when under attack by the RIAA for their work on Kazaa. They transformed this work into a Telecom Company killer product which turned them into billionaires (or close to that). They could actually build a online music business with that money to show to RIAA what P2P is about.. This would actually be an interesting thing to do with that money. Or maybe the Telcos should sue for "illegal sharing of audio conversations".
* This thing could trigger a boom in a few years in Estonia (the developement team seems to be mainly in Estonia) as the many employees there are becoming instant millionaires and might do something interesting in technology with that money.
* Are we really supposed to believe that with multiple hundred millions of $, Niklas and Janus will stick for long at eBay, a company where they will have very limited decision power ? I hope not and wish they will go on to create something new !
* Are we really supposed to believe that eBay bought Skype to give voice services to eBay customers ? It's really not to have some leverage against Google, which everybody expects to launch a PayPal competitor which will be backed by the leadership of AdWords and AdSense and that if it succeeds in grabbing market share from PayPal will be a good basis for launching an Google eBay competitor ? From the three worldwide leaders that now eBay owns, from my point of view, Skype will be the hardest to challenge, despite being the most recent.
* Some of the comments on Share Skype are pretty funny. I like this one "So Skype has been bought by a flea market. Too bad. They should have waited a couple of years, and then they could have bought ebay!".
* According to Ross, Skype's team uses Wikis and Agile methods. Are Skype's team the first eXtreme Programmillionaires ?
Any other real story ?
