skypeI need a crystal ball to see that answer.

Should eBay sell Skype?

You bet they should.

As I have blogged before, there is no doubt Meg Whitman overpaid for Skype ($2.5 billion) on the cross-synergy argument: eBay would sell Skype to their millions of US customers and Skype would sell eBay to their millions of European customers. Sorry, auctions and VoIP just don't really have any synergies.

The service has matured (new users slowing down), at least one major outages in recent memory has hurt their brand. At the same time, rumors of a backdoor for CALEA-style eavesdropping is an issue too. Proprietary security technology is always less secure than open source. So if a backdoor exists, then somebody will find it and not tell anybody about it… In open source technologies or at least well understood technologies the developer community tests the algorithm, the solution and finds weaknesses and publishes about it. This way other folks discover the fix and publish upgrades.

With proprietary security mechanisms, there are no extraneous people testing anything, so the algorithm and system doesn't improve.The bad people find the exploit, exploit it and the vendor is none the wiser, except liable for the hole.

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