Lesson in the Value of Hype
Here’s a suggestion to every Internet executive: take a Post-It note, write “EBay wasted $3 billion on Skype” and stick it to your monitor. Stare at it the next time some hot social whatever-2.0 company comes by and talks about growing fast and finding a revenue model later.
Link
The NYT is hitting Ebay with a tough headline now that the Skype deal officially resulted in a $1.43B loss. This deal - who made me and many others quite skeptic - seems to have created value for only one industry: Swedish private banking.
October 3rd, 2007 at 11:30 pm
The problem is that Skype should have worked on offering what Facebook is doing. Just imagine 200 millions of users on a Facebook. Have a read on “Facebook, futur concurrent de skype ?”.
October 4th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
If I may add a bold forecast,
I’m betting that in less than 18 month, Facebook will be as empty and useless as 2nd life.
A lot of money will be lost in the mean time.
The added-value for users is not clear and outstanding enough.
Once they’ll try to make money out of it, they will lose most of
their community to other free services.
For most Entrepreneurs these days, the goal is to put together a nice Business Plan, receive indecent amount of money for it and leave asap with the maximum cash. Zennstrom did that and yet, HE had a way to make money out of is business plan. Something that most others don’t have.
For investors, it’s to hope that “out of luck” you stumble on a valid project which will find a way to bridge the gap between owning a community and leveraging it financially. A lot of people on the starting grid, few at the arrival…
These kinds of “all-in-one apps “often lose most of their usefulness by mixing together people/groups which wouldn’t want to stick around each other in real life or simply are not meant to be related. (Work, Friends, Family,…). Remember, Facebook was meant for Students in Harvard in the first place, no real need at that time to build clusters.
Am I the only one feeling to old to play (kindergarten) social apps?
I would rather have something to work with.
Something that helps control, define, gather my groups of interests in a slick, professional and most of all serious manner.
And if I want to see the latests photos of your parties, then I’ll either See you/ call you / mail you/…
I’m not a fan of all this social app frenzy, but, at least targeted apps such as “Linkedin”,”Smallworld”, …
are less intrusive, more focused, more defined… and “maybe” even sometimes, they can help.
PS: I give Twitter 3 month…
October 5th, 2007 at 11:05 am
I was thinking among the exactly same lines for a long time, then I discovered the value of “presence” applications. Twitter is not blogging, it’s a way to have people around you in the flow of what you are doing, and there is value in that.
Now the value of presence and a decent business model still seem to be two different things, so you might be right about the 3 month comment ;)