leapingcat

Hello Cloud Storage, Goodbye Consumer Hard Disk Drives

At present cloud storage makes most sense for new or growing companies, where its scalability gives those companies the ability to easily cater for changes in storage needs without a large investment. For individual consumers, storage needs are generally more predictable and increasing local storage will remain the sensible option for some time to come.

What Will Become of eBay?

This article shows that merely analysing figures without trying to understand them is not a very good idea. Once you look a bit deeper it is no surprise that an increase in listings has been followed by a decrease in traffic. Ebay have discriminated against their traditional sellers in favour of the so-called Diamond Power Sellers with their inferior listings both in terms of income per item and desirability.
Let us look in a bit more detail at that allegation that auctions are falling out of favour and fixed price sales are booming. Auction sales may be down slightly, I'm quite happy to accept the 8% figure, but that is hardly surprising from the number of sellers who have left in disgust at Ebay's policies rather than there own downturn in sales. The Medved figures actually show that in the categories that are traditionally dominated by auctions, auction sell-through rates have remained consistently high, and in collectables have actually increased from approximately 40% to approximately 50% over the last three months. On the other hand the sell-through rates for fixed price listings for books, one of the categories that the likes of buy.com have moved into has plummeted from about 45% to about 15%.
These figures are not difficult to obtain, yet I have always found that an analysis based purely on numbers can never give a satisfactory answer to the question as to whether to invest in a company and if so at what price. On that basis I would not invest in Ebay at any price as long as the current policies and management are in place.