Editor's Corner

Disclaimer: I've never bought or sold anything on eBay, and I don't have any inclination to. Now that I've said that, I've got to also admit I've never understood some of the business plays the online buy-sell storefront has made over the years; and the most recent declaration by the company's CEO has me scratching my head a bit. Meg Whitman told analysts last week that she envisions completely free phone service via VoIP in the very near future.

I'm sure she hopes that happens given her company's recent $4 billion purchase of Skype Technologies--one of those things I didn't get then and don't get now. Whitman thinks the business model for telephony will move from billing users to advertising and transactional payees, hence the free phone service that will be flowing over the Internet. For some reason I don't see any providers throwing out longstanding business operating models--just look at how long it's taken to hash out the emergency phone call issue with VoIP. Yet given what Whitman has done as CEO and how the early pundits scoffed at eBay, you have to give some merit to what she says. After all, she's thrown a lot of wheat into VoIP with the Skype buy. - Judy