Gary Kim recently penned a post about eBay spinning off Skype as a cautionary tale for communications enabled business processes. I enjoy reading Gary’s posts and do so daily, but I have to respectfully disagree with Gary in this case. This divorce has much more to do with eBay’s internal teams simply not looking for communications solutions outside the current auction platform process more than not seeing value in CEBP.
In my view, the primary reason Skype was never a good fit for eBay is eBay’s direct communications resistant culture. In my experience, you can’t contact eBay via phone—they don’t support a call center or anything that resembles live customer service. Try to find a number [...]