eBay Believes the Skype

"Voice will be a natural extension of everything we are already doing on the Net," says Yankee Group analyst Kate Griffin.

eBay sees Skype as a way to provide buyers and sellers of big ticket items like cars and property with a way to instantly communicate. eBay will presumably set up a cheap Skype call and allow users to flash their PayPal at the toll like EZ-Pass.

It's not likely that founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis had an e-commerce tool in mind when they started Skype, but they were certainly singing the praises of the global marketplace Monday.

"Our vision for Skype has always been to build the world's largest communications business and revolutionize the ease with which people can communicate through the Internet," said Skype CEO Zennstrom. "We can't think of any better platform to fulfill this vision to become the voice of the Internet than with eBay and PayPal."

Fortuitously, eBay's timing suited Skype. The VoIP market was starting to heat up, and as Google and Yahoo demonstrated that it didn't take a Skype to get into the business of voice on the Net.

"Skype's growth has been extraordinary, but they had no proven business model," says Yankee's Griffin. "And there's limited potential for standalone VoIP companies just offering phone service."

Clearly Skype found deeper pockets and a much broader operation to attach itself to. And eBay's chief Meg Whitman was happy with the purchase on a conference call Monday.

Skype's "technology is generations ahead of others," said Whitman. And when people use your "brand name as a verb, that's incredibly powerful," she says, referring to the ability to be Skyped instead of called.

But with the cost of the deal running to as much as $4.1 billion if performance targets are hit, some analysts say the price tag is a tad steep.

"This is a big leap in logic. Maybe they can convert some of Skype's customer base into users of other services," says one analyst. "But you get the feeling there's too much money sloshing around with these Internet players."