Another Round of Corporate Ownership

But the best thing about this is getting the asset back into the hands of the entrepreneurs who created it and built it. We all saw what happened at Apple when Jobs took back the reins of the company and I suspect Niklas and Janus would not be thinking about this if they didn’t have a strong strategic plan for Skype.

The past six months

In the past six months, something changed at Skype and now we see the end game is a sale to another corporate owner. We can speculate on what those changes were. Like as not the public market was not that receptive to the offering. Perhaps the company was having difficulty growing its earnings as fast as the public markets wanted. Perhaps the investors lost confidence in the management's ability to continue to build and grow Skype as an independent company. Whatever the reasons, Skype's experiment with being independent is over and I am disappointed.

We use Skype every day in our office. It is our videoconferencing system and increasingly our phone system. It works amazingly so then. Recent UI changes to the new client have been frustrating. On a Skype conference call yesterday, we were all lamenting the loss of the old client where we knew where everything was. Skype brought VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) to the masses and I'm very certain that someday we will all be communicating by voice and video over IP, perhaps via Skype, like as not be other services. It is the future for sure.

I'm not particularly inspired by the idea that Microsoft will do something great with Skype. However I do think they are a better corporate owner than eBay. The second acquisition of Skype isn't likely to change our daily usage of the service. Yet it may be an inspiration to VOIP entrepreneurs everywhere to think big and create new services that can someday be as big or bigger than Skype. And that's a good thing.