Published at LXer:

The halls of investing are littered with companies that had great businesses, but eventually stagnating growth, which inevitably gave their management the urge to do something in order to prove the growth story was still alive. Peter Lynch referred to this phenomenon as diworsification. Diworsification pretty much sums up how I have felt about Motley Fool Stock Advisor selection eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) and its acquisition of Skype, which lets users chat via voice and video over the Internet. Internet telephony isn't all that unique; offerings from Apple Computer's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iChat service, Time Warner's (NYSE: TWX) AOL TotalTalk service, and a number of free software packages such as Gizmo allow you to do the same.

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