He who knows, never speaks… (publically)…

In followup of an earlier post…

"He who knows never speaks..... He who speaks never knows......."

Somebody (one of my smart readers, yes smarter than me, it exists) who wishes to remain anonymous did not understand why you stating the two first paragraphs twice... Well that was just a copy/paste mistake. At least somebody noticed…

Then mr anonymous goes on stating that there are two stories inappropriately intertwined here and make the argument nonsensical.

1. Stock prices and rumored layoffs. The answer to increasing stock prices is NOT in selling off assets and taking further loss on them. The answer is how eBay is run.

2. Does Skype fit in current eBay plans. That has been around since eBay bought it. By itself the question has not been answered yet by eBay. Whether their stock is up or down does not affect the way Skype might or might not fit in eBay.

Mixing the two arguments makes very little sense to me. There is no connection between the two of them.

The fact that Skype is still owned by eBay probably means that somewhere in the corporate hallways there is someone of substance with a long term plan who thinks Skype has potential for eBay. So Skype is not a short term fix for them. Stock prices dropping is a short term problem. They need to get in front of more potential customers, have new and streamlined "products", better sales procedures, be easier to do business with, make more money to their users, reduce "cost of sales" - that is reduce administrative overhead.

My personal opinion is that eBay strayed away from the best auction site in the world to an "ah so lame supermarket". Nobody bids anymore. Vendors are allowed to hang their price lists there and charge fixed prices for goods. So for the bargain hunter, it has become a mammoth task to find what you want. Every search will bring 100 entries for what you are looking for with fixed prices. eBay is no longer a fun place to bargain hunt. The vendors are getting squeezed on eBay too. Selling anything there is not fun anymore either.

If Swan is right and the revenue/employee is climbing, then they are either getting out of the slide or their adming costs per sale is climbing even higher. The latter could be a problem.

Considering the pimple on eBay's arse, Skype, their revenue per employee is much higher than eBay's will ever be. That's the nature of their business and they really have a small team generating lot of dough.

Don't count them out. Who owns them is almost a non-issue. Within eBay they seem to be rather autonomous. I don't think that they would be any better off under Google. They would probably never make that corporate culture transition thing there so they would have to absorbed or left alone like eBay has done. If Google did the same, the results, whether you like it or not, would be much the same as they are today.