From John Hagel:

...The eBay presentation talks eloquently and at length about the role of Skype in accelerating commerce on eBay and opening up new lines of business, new monetization models and new geographies. I agree that adding voice to transactions makes for richer communication and reduces friction, especially in certain types of transactions and certain national cultures. But then again, adding shipping services helps to reduce friction as well – does that mean eBay should go out and buy FedEx? Yes, markets are conversations as Ross Mayfield reminds us, but does that mean you need to buy a phone company to participate or even orchestrate those conversations?

Pay per call lead generation models are an interesting step beyond pay per click models, at least for certain kinds of businesses. There clearly are interesting opportunities to cross market to each other’s user base (one interesting statistic from the presentation – there is only a 1% overlap in their US user base – although this can be read both ways, as either an opportunity or a challenge).

But here are the bottom line questions:

• Is this acquisition going to improve the performance of the individual businesses in ways that either would not be possible or at least would be much more expensive without an acquisition?
• Are there any other business relationships short of acquisition that could have produced these improvements in performance?
• Will the improvement in performance be sufficient to earn an acceptable return on the very high price paid for Skype?
• Why couldn’t eBay simply have licensed Skype’s (or any other VoIP provider’s) service and embedded it in its platform to deliver voice-enriched transactions or pay per call lead generation programs?

Why couldn’t they have negotiated cross-marketing programs to reach each other’s user base?