Apparently that’s what the holding company, the online auction major Ebay said in a regulatory filing to the US securities and Exchange Commission late last week and this is mainly due to the legal suite that Joltid has filed on Skype over Skype’s use of Joltid’s technology despite former revoking the license.
“Although Skype has contracts in place with its third-party technology providers, there can be no assurance that the licensed technology or other technology that we may seek to license in the future will continue to be available on commercially reasonable terms, or at all,”. “The loss of, or inability to maintain, existing licenses could result in a decrease in service quality or loss of service until equivalent technology or suitable alternatives can be developed, identified, licensed and integrated,” eBay said as quoted on telecoms.
Sweden based Joltid Ltd is a company owned by Skype’s founders and also owns Skype’s core p2p technology called Global Index. If you didn’t know already, ebay made a big blunder buying Skype and the reasons are -
- Ebay payed an exorbitant $3.1 billion for skype and it is yet to justify that price.
- Ebay only bought the communication layer,the skype but not the core technology, Global Index, it just licensed Global Index for Skype.
- Skype didn’t fit in to the Ebay’s business in the first place and there was hardly any synergy between the two.
Is Skype’s core technology not replaceable?
Though replacing the core technology seems pretty daunting for Skype,it is still replaceable. Andy bramson of VOIP Watch point’s out that Joltid isn’t that important to skype and that Skype is brand big enough for user’s to care if Skype uses Joltid’s technology or replaces it with it’s own all SIP based architecture as long as it works, but the legal suite will still remain pretty important and costly for Ebay.
Earlier Ebay was hoping to spinoff skype and later had plans for an IPO for the same but now the latest row with JoltId is a big blog for the IPO plans.Ebay despite touting skype’s 405 million registered users, $551 million in sales and projected revenue of $1 billion in 2011, could not find a buyer for an asking price of $1.4 billion.
