Daily Archives: October 1, 2007

eBay: we goofed

Posted on by

From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Today, in what will undoubtedly be a blow to the Skype founders’ seller rating, eBay finally acknowledged that its bid for the VoIP firm may have been a tad overenthusiastic and that whatever expectations it had were not being met. EBay announced that in the quarter just ended, it will take $1.4 billion in write-offs and charges related to the Skype acquisition. About $530 million will go to former Skype shareholders to help them forget about those additional performance-based payouts. And eBay will write off about $900 million in Skype-related “goodwill” to more accurately reflect the acquisition’s value. And just in case the message wasn’t clear, Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom was eased out of the CEO’s office and given the non-executive chairman’s seat at the Skype board table.

Wow!

That still leaves open the question of what eBay ought to do with its tarnished toy, and Henry Blodget has an answer: sell it to someone who could put it to use, like Yahoo, Microsoft or Google.

This year’s Xmas book

Posted on by

Every Christmas there’s a book which takes the UK market by storm. It’s the book that everyone thinks someone else would like to read — the perfect literary stocking-filler. In earlier years it was Lynne Truss’s Eats Shoots and Leaves and Schott’s Miscellany.

I’ve just finished what I predict will be this year’s Christmas Book. It’s Alan Bennett’s delicious fantasy about what would happen if HM the Queen became a serious reader. Here she is explaining Proust to the (baffled) Foreign Secretary:

“Terrible life, poor man. A martyr to asthma, apparently, and really someone to whom one would have wanted to say, ‘Oh do pull your socks up.’ But literature’s full of those. The curious thing about his was that when he dipped his cake into his tea (disgusting habit) the whole of his past life came back to him. Well, I tried it and it had no effect on me at all. The real treat when I was a child was Fuller’s cakes. I suppose it might work with me if I were to taste one of them, but of course they’ve long since gone out of business, so no memories there. Are we finished?”. She reached for her book.

124 pages of pure, unadulterated bliss. If I were a screenwriter I’d be working on the adaptation now.

The Brooning of Labour

Posted on by

If, like me, you were repelled by the unctuous vapouring of Gordon Brown’s Conference Speech, then you’ll enjoy Ross McKibbin’s acerbic commentary in the current LRB. Sample:

How problematic Brown’s policies were and are has been demonstrated by the Northern Rock affair. In the short term, of course, its difficulties were not the doing of the government. Northern Rock was the victim of a crisis in the international banking system caused by unwise mortgage lending in the United States. In the longer term, however, Brown, New Labour and much of the country’s political and financial elite have acquiesced, with more or less enthusiasm, in a financial regime which began in this country with the abolition of credit restrictions by the Thatcher government. Although there were arguments in favour of abolition it was always very risky – just as the present colossal levels of personal indebtedness (essential to Labour’s electoral success) are very risky. That it came to a run on a bank – something that has not happened in Britain for 150 years, not even in the international financial crisis of 1931 when the stability of the British banking system was the wonder of the world – shows how instinctively (and understandably) nervous people are of this regime. Furthermore, Brown’s system of regulation worked badly. It was he who divided regulatory responsibility between the Financial Services Authority and the Bank of England – which was asking for trouble – and it was he who extended the autonomy of the Bank, with predictable results.

The truth is that — as McKibbin points out — much of what is most detestable about New Labour — its authoritarianism, contempt for civil liberties, adulation of ‘wealth creation’, micromanagerial obsessiveness over ‘targets’, PFI, etc. — are actually more Brown’s creations than Blair’s. The only difference is that Brown is now varnishing them with a new layer of patriotic tosh about “Britishness”, “British values”, etc. If the Tories weren’t so pathetic there might be some hope of unhorsing the pompous ass.