This week Skype announced its new Skype for Business services aimed at small and medium-sized businesses. On the surface this makes good sense, Skype believes up to 30% of it’s users are businesses already, but the news and details revealed so far does not seem to be blowing anyone’s socks off, despite positive coverage in both Business Week and the L.A. Times. Jeff Pulver summed up many of the analyst’s opinions with his quote in the Times:

“It’s great that they’re doing these things, but I don’t see any home runs here.”

Russell Shaw at ZDNet has a less sympathetic approach and takes Skype to task for seemingly announcing the new service before it’s ready to go, just so they can get into the CeBit news cycle. Russell’s Seven ways that Skype is fumbling their Skype for Business launch post is worth reading for anyone launching a new service, and his point about having your web site ready to go with all the new info when you announce something new is a good one.

Looking over the Skype for Business site, it’s hard not to agree with Russell. It’s not at all apparent what, if anything, has been changed from the current Skype 2.0 software to appeal to business users, and other than re-naming the Skype Groups Control Panel to Skype for Business Control Panel, it doesn’t seem that anything new has been added.

A more interesting Skype development was noted by Om Malik today, as he reports that eBay is beginning to integrate Skype into it’s auction pages in some European countries.