Saturday, May 12, 2007

eBay & Skype - where's the integration?


eBay's purchase of Skype promised innovative, unheralded e-commerce and voice capabilities merged into one cohesive platform, this transaction (nearly 2 years old; or an eternity in internet time) has brought little other than some superficial trials at integration. Paypal, eBay and Skype (the power of 3 as discussed at last years devcon) are still very disparate, separate companies.

This is a screen shot of eBay's IM notification service. It is pretty obvious who is missing, my question is - How can this possibly be allowed to happen? If I paid several billions of dollars for an IM platform, I am pretty sure I would integrate it into my core business and stop promoting my competition.

There is something greater than the sum of the parts to be achieved, but I am not sure the powers @ eBay understand it.

Pretty embarrassing.

**Update Sept 5th 2007 - I don't know if my rant had anything to do with it, but you can now get alerts via Skype IM from eBay auctions! Good job (even if it did take 2 years)

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