Whatever business your website is in, it needs to be compliant with current law. Along with that, being internet law compliant can save you more than just money. It can keep you out of jail. Take a moment and see if you are breaking the law without eve…

Last week, Meg Whitman announced her departure from eBay. eBay is one of the 3 great winners of Web 1.0, together with Amazon.com and Yahoo. Although she was not the original eBay President (Jeff Skoll was), she has lead the…

Meg, you are lower than garbage, you have lived the high life off of stolen goods, stolen money, frozen accounts, fraud and junk product being sold.

Meg is leaving eBay and handing it off to John Donahoe. It’s big enough news to bring me back to my keyboard to riff some more.
I cant believe the negative press Meg has gotten in the last few month. In the “what have you done for me …

It will likely become a division of one of the major media companies

yupnup.com

NOT some freckeld fresh-faced kid a la Facecook. Now THAT deserves a huge round of applause peepal, Japan or not. Omidyar & Co. had great vision but not the execution smarts to grab a charging bull by its balls, er.. horns.

as far as paypal..everyone and their mother knew ebay was going to buy paypal.. owned paypal stock at the time cuz it was sooo friggin obvious, and thats prob why they only paid like a 10% premium for it.

-shootz

>Per the WSJ, which tends to get its facts more accurate than TC: She led the company through its September 1998 initial public offering, and eBay has since delivered more than 40 consecutive quarters of sequential revenue growth. Profit has increased every year and the company now has 248 million registered users globally and 15,000 employees. Its $5.97 billion in revenue last year marked a big jump from revenue of $86 million in 1998.>

By the way, having met Meg Whitman, I don’t see a trace of that conceit.

I’ve always been really impressed and inspired by Meg Whitman, ebay lead the charge online for many many years and has always had a remarkable outlook and story regarding how they help people lead better lives and constantly remove barriers for commerce. I think this sort of idealism and passion is a direct reflection on Meg’s leadership, she is one of my heroes in the business world for sure.

The time is right for change at ebay and whether they can reemerge as a leader will be a big ?

my thoughts on Skype: add features! enable screen sharing, along with the video conferencing - keep disrupting or else sell it off to a company that will help it reach its potential.

eBay is one giant ad! Erick, did you ask this question? That is such a slap in the face! I love it.

Where Palm smugly repeated its “Zen of Palm” mantra (in reality, an excuse for not building new stuff), eBay is still wallowing in the cult-of-Pierre, who should be rewarded for being first and doing a good job, but not as some sort of prophet who created a totally unprecedented business.

Minor improvements are then also elevated to the profound, as when Donohoe talks about giving users search results arrayed by other than “time-ending-soonest.” They’ve been offering fixed-price sales for freaking years! Dollars to doughnuts, half their middle management corps has been pointing out this obvious, simple problems every week. Pick your analogous Palm example.

eBay is only still strong because of network effects and because they played defense well, avoiding catastrophic failures that might have killed the business. There is a ton of potential still in their properties, but it doesn’t sound like Donohoe is the guy to tap it. Their entire senior management team should probably be ineligible to replace Whitman.

Their latest trick is the paypal merchant account system. Which in and of itself is not a “bad” deal but it’s the way they implement it. Today it’s very easy to use a CMS (content management system) back end and create a website with shopping cart features. You could literally have your products setup with a shopping cart system and active with in a couple hours.

Lets assume that you do not have a merchant account and plan to use paypal as your only payment processor. When a perspective customer views your site & goes through the check out process paypal will direct them to a page that is designed to look as though the perspective customer must sign up for a paypal account in order to make their purchase. This of course is not the case but the page is designed in such a manner that the option to NOT sign up for paypal is at the lower portion of page and small lettering. To those customers that do not wish to sign up for paypal or wish to just pay with a credit card this is an immediate turn off and you will lose the customer.

Now, when you inquire at paypal about this issue they will tell you that in order for you to have control of the payment process you must upgrade to a merchant account. This will cost you $30.00 a month and a higher % fee on your transactions. That’s what I call greed and advertising deception. They advertise normal/business accounts can process credit card transactions without their customers having to sign up for an account yet they design their process pages so that the perspective customer will either sing up for their service or cause you to lose a sale. Now, keep in mind they would make a profit even IF the customer did NOT sign up for an account. They just want to push your customer into using their service.

b) Skype does not belong on Hamilton Blvd.

c) eBay is too old of a brand for the Facebook generation