No matter what financial pundits say about EBay's purchase of Skype, Skype has had enormous impact. As "Google" now is a verb, as in "Google it," so is "Skype" as in "Skype me." Assets can trade one way or the other. But "assets" aren't the same thing as "significance" or "value" to people. Skype is hugely valuable to users. No matter how you want to quantify the matter--10 million concurrent peak users or 200 million downloads--that's a huge user base. More important, Skype is part of the fabric of daily life for millions of people, as is Google. We may agree that EBay overpaid for Skype. That has almost nothing to do with the social significance of Skype. That's huge.
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