Ebay's Whitman: "Free Phone Calls by 2010"

Meg Whitman during the recent Ebay quarterly conference call was under the gun of financial analysts for paying a bit too much for Skype. Defending the transaction, Whitman asserted that by utilizing VoIP and advertising subsidies, phone calls will gradually become free by 2010. Everybody understands what Ebay does, and everybody understands what Skype does, and both do their thing exceptionally well. The interesting question of course is, how might Ebay and Skype leverage each other's success to do something disruptive together? Use Skype to allow Ebay sellers/buyers to easily connect via VoIP calls? I hardly think so. The last thing a busy Ebay seller needs is his skype phone ringing off the hook: "is this thing new?" or "how come you didn't ship my stuff yet?". Seems at the moment Ebay and Skype are in two separate silos, both with regard to services provided, technologies used and underlying business models. It also seems any attempt to put them in one silo could very well involve a healthy dash of VoiceXML, or not? Thoughts?

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