What Ruppert Murdoch couldn’t achieve with $3bn, eBay just did with $2.6bn. The summer story “who’s gonna buy Skype?” (reported successively by Olivier and me) has now reached an end and taught us an interesting lesson in my opinion: the importance of the “cool” factor.

If we ignore the option for $1.5bn more depending on financial targets and the nature of the deal (half cash – half share), this deal seems less interesting than the rumoured offer from News Corp. Then, enters the “cool” factor: who would you be more likely to sell to: ultraconservative Murdoch’s “old economy” News Corp OR typical “new economy” eBay, founded by open-minded Omidyar and led by impressive CEO Whitman?

In our era of one-to-one micro-segmenting Marketing, where you have to seduce everybody, be it your customer or your takeover target, eBay surely has done a great job to convince Skype founders and owners, especially as the synergies from that acquisition are far from obvious – to a point that this deal has had the financial community wonder about its finality (resulting in a small fall of eBay stock price).

Takeaway lesson: never underestimate the “cool” factor. That’s ironically how Sony entered the PC market (pioneered 20 years before by Apple) and how Apple stole Sony its leadership role in portable music devices. :)