John Hagel does a great job asking the tough questions about the eBay purchase of Skype:

[from Edge Perspectives with John Hagel: EBay and Skype]

I agree that adding voice to transactions makes for richer communication and reduces friction, especially in certain types of transactions and certain national cultures. But then again, adding shipping services helps to reduce friction as well -- does that mean eBay should go out and buy FedEx? Yes, markets are conversations as Ross Mayfield reminds us, but does that mean you need to buy a phone company to participate or even orchestrate those conversations?

Pay per call lead generation models are an interesting step beyond pay per click models, at least for certain kinds of businesses. There clearly are interesting opportunities to cross market to each other's user base (one interesting statistic from the presentation -- there is only a 1% overlap in their US user base -- although this can be read both ways, as either an opportunity or a challenge).

But here are the bottom line questions:

* Is this acquisition going to improve the performance of the individual businesses in ways that either would not be possible or at least would be much more expensive without an acquisition?
* Are there any other business relationships short of acquisition that could have produced these improvements in performance?
* Will the improvement in performance be sufficient to earn an acceptable return on the very high price paid for Skype?
* Why couldn't eBay simply have licensed Skype's (or any other VoIP provider's) service and embedded it in its platform to deliver voice-enriched transactions or pay per call lead generation programs?
* Why couldn't they have negotiated cross-marketing programs to reach each other's user base?

And John does go on to suggest that as eBay begins to rethink its place in the world as more than just a big auction house, and as a competitor to media messes like Google, Yahoo, and the half of Microsoft that is online, then this may be just the initial piece of a new platform puzzle for eBay. They may be preparing to join the War of the Web Apps -- who is going to dominate as the platform and services provider of this brand new day?

With Skype they get an internet telephony play, which is also an instant messaging network. Note that Google just released their own IM product, and that Yahoo has moved aggressively in the IM/VoIP arenar recently, too.

This may be a case of eBay planning to invest much, much more than the few billion they spent on Skype. What's next to be bought, I wonder?