eBay will emerge as a leader of three businesses and phone calls will become free in three to six years.


Meg Whitman, the chairman and chief executive of eBay, said, eBay will emerge as a leader of three businesses combining electronic markets, online payment systems and Web-based communications. Phone calls will become free in three to six years.

Whitman was answering analysts questions on the acquisition of Skype, in eBay third quarter conference and he said, “The percentage of users that you can actually charge for (phone services) will actually go down, so I actually agree with that and we understood that when we looked at Skype. In the end, the price that anyone can provide for voice transmission on the ‘Net will trend toward zero”. [source]

According to Whitman carriers will make money on advertising and transaction fees and people can make telephone calls for free.

Whitman said, “Our belief is that the winner in this space will be those that have the largest ecosystem”.

He also explained what he meant by ecosystem, “What I mean by that is: the largest number of registered users, the largest number of voice minutes, the largest number of developers who develop the platform, the best product … that users are willing and want to pay for”. [source]

eBay’s ecosystem includes:

About 168.1 registered users for its online auctions
About 68.0 million active users who signed on to bid or sell
About 86.6 million current accounts on its PayPal payment service

eBay has acquired Skype for $4 billion and the site has announced: “The Whole world can talk for free” and “Skype is a little program for making free calls over the internet to anyone else who also has Skype. It’s free and easy to download and use, and works with most computers”. [source]

 

 

 

 

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