The new man charged with keeping the peace between eBay (NSDQ: EBAY), Silverlake, Andreessen Horowitz, CPP and Joltid is former Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) president Miles Flint. Skype is appointing him to chair its new-look, 17-person board, CEO Josh Silverman tells Bloomberg.
Former chairman Michael van Swaaij exited in eBay’s eventual $1.9 billion November sale of 70 percent of the Luxembourg VoIP firm to the above consortium, after acrimonious negotiations. Flint left the handset maker in 2007, before it really started to slide, and was already a Silverlake adviser.
The choice of a handsets man is a logical one for Skype, which seems intent on refocusing on its core VoIP proposition, including getting its service on to consumer mobile phones. Flint has also has previous experience in managing competing interests, by running the London-based, Japanese-Swedish Sony-Ericsson JV.
It’s not just in the consumer area where Skype is moving. At the same time, it’s announcing David Gurle, the head of Thomson-Reuters’ collaboration services and Asian sales, has joined to replace Stefan Oberg as GM and VP of Skype’s B2B team.
Prior to Thomson-Reuters (NYSE: TRI), Gurle oversaw products including NetMeeting and Windows Messenger as head of Microsoft’s real-time communications division and struck carrier partnerships as alliances VP at VoIP firm VocalTec.
Bloomberg: “Skype has said it