"Buying Skype does nothing to further EBay's liquidity advantage. In addition, Skype is not shielded from competition like Ebay's market is."
Skype
I had the same question in my mind as #4, but my guess is that the Chinese government monitors (if not filters) voice chatting.
They do, but the choice is between doing business in China and not.
I've missed important messages because of the way it handles "offline" messages. (Not to mention it's running on a closed protocol.)
Just talked with my colleague Adrian from Bryght, and it's possible we spent as much time laughing as we did talking. We did so through the illicit (in SA) medium of voice over IP, often shortened to VoIP, which in non-technical terms means free telephone calls over the Internet, using Skype. We ran into a problem with Adrian's Powerbook fan being next to the audio input (that's Apple's fault), because at one point it sounded like he was grinding coffee beans. On Skype, my nickname is, of course, sillygwailo, but I don't plan on running it terribly often, partly because when making phone calls, whether using an actual phone or using the Internet, it feels like I'm interrupting someone, and partly because if I'm at my computer, I really should be working.
