14 DAY TRIAL // Skype launched as a small but promising company and, four and a half years later, it is happy to report that its users have talked 100 billion minutes (probably more by now). Not so long ago, the huge pull that the phone and VoIP company has, drew attention towards it and after an interesting chain of events, eBay bought it at the reduced price of $3.1 billion.
Now do the math: 100 billion divided by 3.1 billion and you get some 3 cents per minute that eBay paid for, as Erick Schonfeld of Tech Crunch noted. That's not very cheap, but it's free for the consumers, so why should they worry? The big problem right now is with the phone companies, that lost a big chunk of the minutes mentioned above to the Voice over IP service. Granted many of them wouldn't have happened if not for Skype, but ultimately however many cuts you might attempt to operate in the 100 billion, the remaining number is still huge.
Many have been put out of work because of eBay owned Skype, take for example call return businesses. It was a no-brainer for the client, why pay for something and have a monthly subscription when you can just get it for free? The one downside is that cell phone support isn't all that great as the coverage sometimes tends to fail its users and leave them hanging. Yelling 'Hello!' while wearing your headset and you're in a big crowd (like when you're leaving work at that bloody rush hour) might get people to want to steer clear from you. Then again, if that was your point, it might be a plus, just that you don't need Skype for the job.
To save you the trouble, I've calculated just how many years of continuous talk time we're talking about here: 190258.75, live coverage of roughly all human history. Isn't that something?