Rich Tehrani refers to a post earlier that I made about the possibility of Google buying Skype and suggests a few others.
While Google has the bucks to make the buy, as does Cisco and Oracle, I don’t see the latter two jumping in. They like to be enterprise friendly, and Skype is perceived as anything but that. Google on the other hand is a consumer play, but nothing about Skype today is really about browsing or serving up ads, Google’s main focus. Also Google integrates very slowly and Skype is a company that needs to move fast to grow. Look how long it took to get Jaiku into a real Googlized mode, and GrandCentral is likely still months away from the same.
But if Google did buy Skype from eBay it would come with a lot more advertising related caveats I bet…
eBay should wait a while and spin it off instead. I don’t think any of these potential buyers would have a real reason to take a chance on Skype, last time their potential seemed unbounded, but no so much anymore.