Think about it: would EBay sell a company that generates $900m (or $600m for that matter) a year? And sell it for only $2b, less than they bought it for?
There's always a tendency to assume organizations handling such huge amounts of money know what they're doing. The fact deals like the Skype purchase seems insane to laymen only encourages many people to try and rationalize it with "facts we don't know" and "long term strategy" etc.
However, if you follow Hi Tech for a while, you may find that the simplest explanation for deals like these (or Sun buying MySql for $1b, or AOL buying Bebo for $0.8b, or the AOL-Time Warner merger) is that they are irrational, and the people making them are as susceptible to hype, hubris and ulterior motives as anyone else, perhaps more so - they usually stand to personally lose less as result of their mistakes than the your local Tacqueria owner will lose by choosing a different lettuce supplier.
There's always a tendency to assume organizations handling such huge amounts of money know what they're doing. The fact deals like the Skype purchase seems insane to laymen only encourages many people to try and rationalize it with "facts we don't know" and "long term strategy" etc.
However, if you follow Hi Tech for a while, you may find that the simplest explanation for deals like these (or Sun buying MySql for $1b, or AOL buying Bebo for $0.8b, or the AOL-Time Warner merger) is that they are irrational, and the people making them are as susceptible to hype, hubris and ulterior motives as anyone else, perhaps more so - they usually stand to personally lose less as result of their mistakes than the your local Tacqueria owner will lose by choosing a different lettuce supplier.