• GigaOm, Tuesday, September 1, 2009 2:17 PM

News that eBay has indeed found a group of investors to take Skype off its hands raised more questions than answers on Tuesday. Why, for instance, did Google lose interest in a potential bid for the peer-to-peer Internet telephony service? What impact will the seemingly imminent acquisition have on Skype's long running legal issues. And what was eBay thinking?

"The deal didn't make sense at the time, and eBay has never managed to integrate the technology into its core auction business," writes The Register (UK). eBay CEO "Meg Whitman's claim that the combination of the online tat bazaar and PayPal and Skype would 'create an unparalleled engine for ecommerce and communications around the world' never really materialised."

The move to offload Skype apparently follows a year-long review which concluded that the business was not a good fit with eBay's core auction business or with PayPal, writes The Times, which confirmed earlier reports of the deal on Tuesday.

TechCrunch, which broke the news last week, suspects that eBay's announcement earlier this year to spin off Skype in an IPO in 2010 was contrived. "These announcements are often made to generate acquisition offers from potential suitors," it writes. "If Skype will ultimately be floated on the stock market in the near future remains to be seen."

Either way, Om Malik at GigaOm is calling for all-out insurrection. "If you're an eBay shareholder, it's time for you to get mad about the sheer incompetency of the management," he writes. "First they paid top dollar for Skype back in 2005, making billionaires out of Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis ... And, now instead of waiting for an opportune time to go public, eBay management is selling low, at a time when the only buyers are bargain hunters."

Malik also contends that Skype's fundamental flaw -- an ongoing legal battle over ownership of its core technology -- not only "scared off Google from buying Skype," but will continue to plague the company for a longtime to come.

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