Real Desperation at Skype?

Ok, I might have been wrong. It is certainly starting to look like I was, although I'm not quite ready to give up yet. It looks like the battle between Skype and JoltID might be more than a publicity stunt with a predetermined outcome. Of course, if that is true, then it is also true that eBay somehow managed to find someone to buy Skype from them who is every bit as blind, gullible, naive, or whatever as they themselves were when they bought Skype (minus the technology at the heart of it) a few years ago. P.T. Barnum had an interesting observation which seems to apply here...

The reason I am bringing this up again now is that I have seen rumors this morning about Skype buying Gizmo5, perhaps as a way out of the JoltID bind. I find this terribly amusing, as Gizmo5 and their founer, Michael Robertson, have been a thorn in Skype's side for a long time, both in the market and in the press. In fact, $50 million is more or less "chump change" compared to the billions which have been tossed around buying and selling Skype twice now. So it seems to me that there are three possible reasons that Skype might be considering buying Gizmo5: to shut them up, to shut them down, or to use their technology.

It will be interesting to see if these rumors turn out to be true, and if they do, then to see what Skype really wants with Gizmo5.

jw 14/10/2009

P.S. There is one thing that I find very curious about the article cited above. After blindly parroting the Skype marketing hype "Skype has now more than 400 million users", which pretty much anyone who knows much about Skype says is complete garbage, he goes on to say "Gizmo5 says it has 6 million users, though it is hard to verify that number". Yeah. Right. No doubt or skepticism expressed about Skype's number, but Gizmo's is "difficult to verify"? I guess that just serves to justify Skype's belief in the old saying, if you repeat something enough times, people will believe it.