Ebay plus Skype equals bubble 2.0?
Our blog is meant to provide “our latest thoughts and ideas on IT-business alignment, together with comments on relevant industry events” and I am not sure I can stretch the use of the term relevant to encompass Ebay’s $2.6 billion (and potentially $4.1 billion) acquisition of Skype – but I couldn’t resist. The fact that it occurred on the same day as Oracle’s proposed $5.85 billion acquisition of Siebel only increased the temptation. With Oracle offering a 17% premium (and beginning to look like the CA of business applications – at least the CA of old) and Ebay acquiring at a 40-plus (and possibly close to 70-plus!) multiple of projected 2006 revenues, was yesterday’s $10 billion shopping spree the start of another bubble inflating: a Web 2.0 bubble? Whilst the numbers are certainly big, I am not so sure. I am not a financial analyst and so I am not going to comment on the merits of a 40-plus revenue multiple. However, similar questions were raised when Ebay acquired PayPal and that seems to have worked out, with PayPal streamlining the transaction process and providing an additional source of revenue. I can certainly see similar synergies with Skype. Buyers and sellers will be able to have a real time discussion – IM or voice - about a proposed transaction, rather than an asynchronous email dialogue. And, with Skype’s video conferencing service, even view the subject of the transaction. They could also see additional revenues through some sort of “pay-per-call” from advertisers and merchants. But I think there’s also a broader dimension to this. Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Ebay are all converging on the consumer – albeit from different directions - but, in contrast to Web 1.0, are putting them at the centre, rather than as another eyeball at the edge. With the consumer at the centre of a web of loosely connected, federated services, a similarly loosely coupled, federated identity management system – an identity metasystem – becomes critical. Such a system, as Yahoo recently discovered with Flickr, must put the user in control. Combine Ebay’s massive user community, built-in reputation system to facilitate trust, PayPal payment infrastructure and now Skype, and it has, to my mind at least, the start of such an identity management system. Google is rumoured to be working on a payment system and is beginning, if Google Talk is anything to go by, to use Gmail usernames as a common identifier. Microsoft has Passport, which although an abject failure (rightly so in my opinion) with potential business partners, is not short of a consumer or two and now has VoIP with Teleo. The creation of an identity management system for Web 2.0 is becoming an important (and seemingly expensive!) battleground.
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