Skype-Ebay and today's lesson

You’ve probably seen the announcement already. It was an AP story at 6:30a east coast time that zipped around pretty quickly. At 4:15a here on the West Coast, Technorati shows it as the number 4 thing people are talking about with impeaching bush being number one.

You’ll be reading a ton of stuff from people shortly. Most of the first news will be the AP story repeated. Super smart folks like my friend Mark Evans are commenting. Lots of Wow. Lots of Huh? Lots of trying to make sense of it. Lots of speculation, yadda yadda..

But here’s the exercise you should consider doing:

Instead of trying to make sense of it, worrying about corporate culture, and what “the street” will say, do a let’s pretend.

Let’s pretend you are in charge of it all, Ebay and Skype. Pretend you are super excited. Really pumped.  Make two lists. First list is what couldn’t you do (in the practical sense) before the Internet. Ebay itself would have been all but impossible as well as Skype.  So, auctions, ‘free’ phone calls, etc, are all on that list.  Now, second list. Armed with customer base of both companies and the services of both companies, combined with the capabilities of the Internet, make a list of all the exciting things you can do/offer customers.  Be excited.

My point? 

To get beyond being just a CEO, just having a job, and just ‘increasing value for our shareholders while ensuring maximum value for our customers, employees and partners”; to get beyond all of the norm and knock one clean outta the park, you have to be able to think like my let’s pretend exercise.

[Update: Just as I finished this, I got an email from a good friend of mine at Bell. The key line? “Well, that’s  a relief.”  Hmmm. Personally, I’d be a bit more nervous then that.]

Comments

[Nicole Simon]

I would be too. I expect Ebay to offer Skybaypal local to any ebay user available and make them *click* the biggest voip community world wide.

Messanger? Search? Who needs a messenger when you can sell, buy and talk at the same time?

But as I wrote on ideengeberin.de: The skype users themself might be willing to switch to another new voip system with chat capability, because the community is not that strong tied together. Also most of the plugins did only recently arise on the horizon. Questing is, if they just say "screw it".

As I read some articles about Ebay starting to offer not only auction based transactions but also to normal vendors, why not include internationalized transactions based on shopping and calling? They already have the bank transactions by using paypal. :)

Nicole