Now the fun begins--more comments on eBay and Skype and market implications:

Nivi imagines eBay should next buy SixApart and writes: 'Ebay cannot accept the risk of having a powerful supplier that essentially has a monopoly on VoIP because Skype has a viral product that runs on a closed network with network effects. You could describe Paypal the same way: a viral product that runs on a closed network with network effects."

Michael Parekh says: " Wired and wireless voice communications are being cut loose, from the predictable, steady, metered subscription revenue streams of the past few decades, to having to fend for themselves. .. In the eBay/Skype case, they'll have to be supported through seemingly esoteric but potentially potent new revenue opportunities like "pay-per-call" (a twist on the "pay-per-click" model popularized by Internet advertising companies. Incidentally, pay-per-call is not a hypothetical exercise."

Umair's as shrewd as usual and takes an economics systems approach: "Web 2.0 is about the shift from network search economies, which realize mild exponential gains - your utility is bounded by the number of things (people, etc) you can find on the network - to network coordination economies, which realize combinatorial gains: your utility is bounded by the number of things (transactions, etc) you can do on the network. " So in his world, Skype is another platform with a transactional user base (as opposed to the NYTimes) and that's the future.

Having fun yet? I sure am.