The great dot-com boom, a pot full of lies filled and fuelled by
companies like Enron, Citigroup and other Wall Street associates,
Optical Fiber innovators and greedy scientists like Gururaj Desh, Star
Telecom Analysts like Jack Grubman together brought down the entire
nations economy giving hard time for the conservative and federal
reserve guard, Greenspan.
In the aftermath of Dot.Com bust, the Big 3 of Internet emerged,
Yahoo, Ebay and AOL. Cisco, Sun, Amazon, MSN and others existed but
their business models were not too consumer centric and they only
tried hard to survive growth. A new Stanford born baby was already
conceiving and came to limelight in 2001. Yes you got it right,
Google. With it's powerful Search technology it replaced AOL to join
the Big 3. Google focused on web-services technologies, unveiled new
model of business with its cool web based applications like gmail and
google maps.
It is always said that many of us have herd mentality. So when Google
unveiled their Google Talk, the Redmond company which has already lost
its focus announced the buy-out of Teleo (teleo.com). The telecom and
VoIP bug has now bitten eBay. According to Bloomberg, it is willing to
pay a whopping $3 Billion.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aLvNorCTFLZM&refer=us
So is eBay willing to pay so much just for the subscribers it has?
What about Yahoo integrated instant messaging and VoIP based services
it offers?
These Telecom analysts are all set to ruin the recovery in the IT
world, which came back in the real form of web-services. Don't forget,
Skype is a big hype. Not every customer will pay you for the low
quality service that Skype offers.
The entry cost for Skype like services are very low. Any company with
a million dollar in its treasury and a good negotiator across the
table can use much of open source tools and build such a
service. Where are the customers? In my experience, between Google
Talk and Yahoo!, the former got better customer rating because of the
clarity compared with Yahoo!. But Google has 1/100th the number of
users compared to Yahoo! So lesser the number of customers better the
quality. I think the VoIP market will evolve as a fragmented market
with at least two service providers for every small town and more than a
dozen providers for large cities.
I only hope someone will save eBay from shelling out couple of
billions for a useless services as this. I will not immediately jump
to VoIP unless they come up to the quality of fixed line Telco's
otherwise, I can never conduct my business with lost words in-between
deals. Maybe eBay and Skype officials must negotiate using Skype VoIP
to know what eBay is paying for and what Skype is offering.
<<All can never be said>>
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