Watching Death of Ebay

Some Positives, But Problems Persist at eBay

Wall Street fell for Meg Whitman's PR campaign, thought she was responsible for the Ebay phenomenon. Wrong. A chimp could have done Meg's job. The success of Ebay was the result of millions of individual sellers and buyers.
Trouble is, after a while, Meg started to believe her own PR, seeing herself and her hand picked lieutenant as a divine entities. So they thought they could lie to the media, their customers, their employees and Wall Street. Like the much promoted line from Nixon, "If the President does it, it's not a crime." With Meg & Donohoe it's, "If we do it, it's genius!"

Meg, Inc. thought they could abuse and insult their customers forever. Turns out that judgment was just as poor as their judgments about expansion and acquisitions. I could name 2 dozen sellers who have given up on Ebay in the last 2 months -- not because of the sluggish market but because they're offended by Ebay management's treatment. If you analyst folks had any idea how screwed up Ebay really is you would laugh and laugh that such a company is still traded. When you think about Ebay, think about Enron, except that instead of Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay, Ebay is run by Bubblecut Barbie & Ken. If anyone on Wall Street wants to see Ebay returned to its glory days, the fix is simple: put the customers back in charge of steering the boat. We built Ebay in the first place and we can fix it, if Ebay management would get the hell out of the way.