More changes at Skype – The eBay makeover of Skype is complete. Henry Gomez, a former eBay executive and a veteran marketing professional is the new chief at Skype. He is CMO & Director of Operations for Skype but will be moving into the President’s office. Gomez takes over from Alex Kazim, till recently the president of Skype.
Kazim has been with eBay for around seven years, and was named the president in July 2006. That was a fast exit! Niklas Zennström is still listed as the CEO of Skype. We still have to confirm this news, and will update the story in a few minutes. We are waiting to hear from eBay for a final word on this.
Update: There has been some sort of a major corporate development, and we are trying to nail down the details. Earn-out related issues, and the recent shake-up might have resulted in a showdown leading to this most recent shake-up. As you might remember, the eBay-Skype deal was $1.3 billion in cash, $1.3 billion in eBay stock, and rest was contingent upon Skype meeting certain revenue & growth targets.
Our sources indicate that with recent exodus of original Skypers and business model shift might be coming in the way of those targets, and thus the earnouts. There was an all hands meeting called last night and staff was told of these recent developments sometime today. We are still trying to extract more details, and will be back soon.
These things happen when billion of dollars are spent with no ROI in sight.
Henry, have your developers update the Linux client. In the beginning Skype was more cross platform. Everyone is jump to wengo or gizmo project.
Great, now they can fuck it up just like they did with ebay and paypal. Those 2 companies could care less about the consumers, and in the end, paypal will go from being a great and free company, to being another evil corporate entity. Fuck you ebay / paypal!
It wasn’t the Ebay buyout per se, but Skype has lost 100% of its’ cool factor. It’s still great for working around firewalls (Although Gizmo has gotten better), but apart from that it hasn’t got anything to recommend about it.
Add to that the fact that it’s not standards compliant, doesn’t interconnect with anything else and has become more and more of a system hog, and it’s right on the verge of getting kicked from my Dock. SIP sucks, and it’s triply sucky if you’re adminning a firewall, but it’s standard, it’s interconnectable and it works.
Skype would need an incredible rabbit out of the hat at this point to make me change my mind about it
LG
I wonder if Skype now is going to be abusive towards their customer base as ebay/Paypal is ?
It is going to be interesting.
In top floor office he may not realize that it a totally diffirent ballgame with tons of real competition for your customers to leave to.