Android has an interesting list of new features. Just like the distance from your laptop keyboard to the internet is zero, Android seems to envision that the distance from your mobile phone to the internet ought to be zero. That picture you shot from your mobile phone should end up straight at Picassa. Why download? Why upload? Why the drama? Same with video. Take it straight from the mobile phone to YouTube. Skip the download, upload drama. Online photo and video editing would be tackling the same problem from another angle.
AOLTime Warner could not build the promised synergy. Now looks like eBay and Skype are a repeat history case. Could this perhaps been predicted at the outset? Is a Microsoft going into hardware losing direction? Or is it reinventing itself? Nokia has reinvented itself many, many times over the decades.
eBay and PayPal were synergistic. Skype was stretching it.
But then will the Skype spinoff make enough money for eBay that the original deal will have been worth it? At 405 million, Skype has twice the community size as Facebook. When Skype got bought a lot of people were like, oh no, they overpaid. But looks like not. The founders of Skype would be happy to buy it back. The brand made half a billion last year. The two and a half billion price tag could be recouped in a matter of years.
Skype is a hub, it is a community, it is the iPhone of that big rectangle. And it is capable of doign iPhone like things. Yes, I am talking about applications. I have a feeling Skype will really take off when we enter the ubiquitous wimax era in a few short years. Now is the time to do the homework for the best possible positioning.