While try­ing to get my cable modem speed upgraded, the cable com­pany sales­man tried to pitch me their home phone ser­vice for $30/month. When I pointed out that I’m cur­rently pay­ing $5/month for Skype, he said that their home phone ser­vice wasn’t VoIP, so it would work when the Inter­net con­nec­tion was out. In other words, I should pay six times as much for their ser­vice because the other ser­vice they’re already pro­vid­ing is so unre­li­able. I guess cable ser­vice sales­man is one job that requires a good sense of humor.

Skype fires sev­eral man­agers after Microsoft deal clears. Although Microsoft has made Skype a sep­a­rate divi­sion within its orga­ni­za­tion and has promised con­tin­ued sup­port for its exist­ing struc­ture, the cuts are unlikely to assuage fears that Microsoft may reshape Skype in a way that hurts non-Windows plat­forms or Skype itself. [Elec­tro­n­ista]

They cer­tainly aren’t assuag­ing my fears any. I jet­ti­soned my over­priced PSTN ser­vice in favor of Skype six years ago and have gen­er­ally been happy with it, but even before the Microsoft pur­chase their sup­port for OS X was indif­fer­ent and for iOS down­right bad. I wouldn’t be ter­ri­bly sur­prised to see Skype become Windows-only in the future. Not only that, Microsoft has a his­tory of buy­ing per­fectly good prod­ucts and wreck­ing them.

The big news this month is that Microsoft is buy­ing Skype. That’s bad news for me, as I replaced my old-fashioned land­line with Skype years ago. While I was already using it mostly on my Win­dows machine, I did also occa­sion­ally make Skype calls from my Mac lap­top and my iPad. Skype was already some­what indif­fer­ent in their sup­port of Apple OSes (they never did release an iPad-specific ver­sion), and we can expect that to get worse or be dropped entirely once the pur­chase goes through. We can also expect them to ruin the Win­dows ver­sion with thou­sands of “fea­tures” that nobody wants.

L@@K: eBay spin­ning off Skype, IPO com­ing in 2010.

Over the week­end, rumors sur­faced that Skype’s founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, were attempt­ing to buy the VoIP ser­vice back from eBay. It turns out that, yes, eBay is intent on get­ting rid of Skype, but it won’t be sold right back to its founders. Instead, the online auc­tion giant will spin off the VoIP ser­vice via an IPO some time in 2010.

When eBay first pur­chased Skype from Zennström and Friis in Sep­tem­ber 2005, we were skep­ti­cal of the syn­er­gies eBay hoped to real­ize from the pur­chase. With the spin­off announce­ment, it looks as though eBay has real­ized this as well. “Skype is a great stand-alone busi­ness with strong fun­da­men­tals and accel­er­at­ing momen­tum,” said eBay CEO, John Don­a­hoe in a state­ment. “But it’s clear that Skype has lim­ited syn­er­gies with eBay and Pay­Pal. We believe oper­at­ing Skype as a stand-alone pub­licly traded com­pany is the best path for max­i­miz­ing its potential.”

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle
[Ars Tech­nica]

That’s unfor­tu­nate, as it means the Skype will remain an Amer­i­can com­pany under the thumb of the Evil Empire.

Four years later, Skype’s founders look­ing to buy it back.

The pop­u­lar VoIP ser­vice Skype started out as an inde­pen­dent com­pany, and it may soon end up the same way. Skype’s founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, are report­edly look­ing for ways to buy the com­pany back from eBay, after hav­ing sold it to the auc­tion giant in 2005. eBay may be open to such a deal too, as the two com­pa­nies have had trou­ble mesh­ing right from the start.

Zennstrom and Friis sold Skype to eBay in 2005 for US$2.6 bil­lion in cash and stock, with the pos­si­bil­ity of an addi­tional $1.5 bil­lion pay­out if cer­tain finan­cial goals were met. At the time, eBay planned to inte­grate Skype’s tech­nolo­gies into its online auc­tion busi­ness, pro­vid­ing buy­ers with a “click to call” but­ton on auc­tions so that they could ask ques­tions and com­mu­ni­cate with sell­ers. eBay also pos­tu­lated that it could use Skype on its own cus­tomer sup­port site, giv­ing con­sumers a problem-solving option in addi­tion to eBay’s Web interface.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle
[Ars Tech­nica]

I’m hop­ing that this sale hap­pens. I don’t have much use for tele­phone ser­vice, but when I do I use Skype, and I’d really pre­fer it if any telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions ser­vice I use weren’t owned by Americans.