Op-Ed

eBay just bought Skype. For $4.1 billion!

Oh man. This is just so wrong. I thought the era of brainlessly overpriced companies has passed, but apparently that isn’t so.

How exactly are they going to justify this price? They can’t, it’s simply not possible.

The technology is not that special. There are lots of people working on comparable stuff, and lots of alternatives emerging already. Hello? Google Talk? Gizmo? Asterisk PBX? And all the rest.

Good, Skype has a large user base. But even if there is no real contender with a comparably stable and usable client right now, there will be. Pretty soon. It will be free, probably based on an open source infrastructure, and blow all attempts at making Skype a pay service (if that’s what they are attempting).

I don’t think that Skype is a company of no apparent value; I just think that this price is not justifiable. Not even the brand is worth that much.

Welcome to the next corporate Internet boom. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Om Malik has links. Good ones too.

I keep reading about New Orleans, and most of the news is disturbing and embarrassing. The shock over a complete lack of government response to me easily matches the shock over the actual event.

Daily Kos was one of the first American blogs to write about a story that first broke on German television, of all places (”Tausend Nationalgardisten begleiten Hilfs-Konvoi von Amphibienfahrzeugen - Aufräumen nur für Bush?“). President Bush had a press event in the streets of New Orleans, and apparently handled the event like any other of his press events: It’s not a show if it’s not staged.

Daily Kos: Levee repairs faked for Bush photo-op?

Bottom line: When the convoy of the President arrived, hectic activity broke out for the first time, bulldozers appeared and cleared areas that didn’t need clearing because nobody was still living there, and when the President disappeared, so did the bulldozers and workers.

This apparent detachment from real events is just disturbing. Please, American public, don’t let him get away with this. You can’t even call this chutzpah any more. It’s just dreadful.

This staged event also illustrates the validity of mayor Ray Nagin’s comment on the situation one day before Bush’s TV appearance:

I don’t want to see anybody do anymore goddamn press conferences. Put a moratorium on press conferences. Don’t do another press conference until the resources are in this city. And then come down to this city and stand with us when there are military trucks and troops that we can’t even count.

Among the growing accusations of race segregation in the handling of the evacuation, one article caught my attention: billmon’s comparison of the government’s reactions to the three storms in Florida in 2004 to the current situation in New Orleans, in a must-read article titled “Where There’s a Will“.

And I’m also getting more and more confident that conservative Christians will abuse the catastrophe as a scapegoat, to describe it as an act of god who punished the people of New Orleans for their sinful lifestyles. Yesterday’s Observer already had it as a headline: “God is tired of New Orleans….” (page 14).

I’m happy about how Nagin seems to handle the situation; in a sea of PR he seems to have a refreshingly reality-based approach, and his now-famous radio interview with WWLAM has surely impressed a lot of listeners, me included. It’s a very emotional response, and reveals an anger and energy in Nager that is clearly not staged. I wonder what this will mean to his future — in the interview he mentions that his overt statements might destroy his political career, but I hope for the opposite. If he currently were a candidate for the position of President right now, and if I could vote (I’m not American), I would vote him in an instant. I don’t know anything about his political positions, but right now he seems like a sole fighter against a faith-based community of white supremacists, and I hope that the American public will honor his position appropriately.

Wuahaha. John Battelle’s Searchblog was one of the first sources to quote an amazing leaked court document that is currently getting a lot of attention — it describes a conversation between Steve Ballmer and now former employee Mark Lucovsky, who left Microsoft in late 2004. In this conversation, Lucovsky tells Ballmer that he is leaving for Google, and Ballmers reaction is revealing.

Mr. Ballmer said: “Just tell me it’s not Google.” I told him it was Google.

At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Ballmer then said: “Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I’m going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill Google.”

This is just too cool. Not even the revelation that Ballmer is apparently not as indifferent towards competitors as he wants everybody to think he is. We all know this is just an act. (Cf. his interview with Channel 9, where he brags about having surpassed IBM and other old-school tech companies, but avoids to even mention Google, or Apple. Read “Steve Ballmer Creeps Me Out” for a short analysis of the video, and pictures.)

No, the great thing about this transcript is that it illustrates pointedly what kind of a person he is. That he can’t restrain himself. That he reacts badly under pressure. That he takes his business very, very personal, and that he loses his judgement over his seemingly inhuman desire to dominate.

There are some unusually interesting comments on the accompanying Slashdot story. Excerpts:

And this is the problem, isn’t it? Microsoft can’t coexist with anyone. To them, “the competition” is anyone in the computer industry who is making money or gaining power who is not them. […] Microsoft keeps demonstrating, again and again, that they believe no one may have power but them, and keep killing companies to attain that goal.

Re:And this is the problem, isn’t it? I used to work for a company that had a mini MS complex: we thought everyone in IT industry services sector or reseller channel was a competition. The result: we fought a war on 900 fronts and could not bring critical resources to bear on our real competitors […] Right now, MS is showing signs of what I saw at Inacom:

• Changes and delays with their OS product.
• Development of huge initiatives that business partners want and customers don’t want like DRM and trusted computing.
• Not adapting to changing business models - open source for example.
• Ability to market, but not deliver - like the MSN search that was going to be more accurate, etc…
• Competing against yourself - AXAPTA, NAVISION, GreatPlains… how many competing and overlapping ERP/CRM packages do you need?
• … [rest omitted, ed.]

Time to rethink owning MSFT stock? Investors should take note of these types of situations. While we all think it funny, it offers insight into the emotional response of the CEO of the world’s largest software company. It shows his a weakness, that he is personally threatened by Google, and a despiration, that he feels Google just one upped him. There is a difference between being passionate about your products and being threatened by your market mates.

And the repeated comparisons with Nikita Khrushchev make it even more colorful.

Ah, we live in great times. Democratizing technology on the rise, business makes a clown of itself.