SkyPO

The Godfather of Broadband, Om Malik, is unconvinced by reports of Skype's plans to go public. He cites the BusinessWeek article as an irritant, which has vague similarities to the Independent coverage from last week. I'm wondering if we're starting to see the same thin leads being regurgitated in a daisy chain (the Independent piece was a fairly transparent rehash of the Cringely blog post on NewsCorp, though it ended up sounding like he was an interviewee of the Independent - and now they expect you to pay one pound to read it!). The Independent and BusinessWeek pieces also share an odd tendency to namecheck Howard Hartenbaum (hello, Howard - you rock!) as though he's somehow separate from Draper Fisher Jurvetson - which also makes me a bit suspicious. What I am hearing is that a number of investment banks are pestering Skype to go public, but not at the company's invitation (this is a key area of expertise of investment banks - pressuring companies to go public when they're not really interested/ready). A cynic might say that with MSN licensing GIPS wideband codecs and Yahoo! clearly out for blood, there's no time like the present. I, like the Ominator, am unconvinced.