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eBay Looking for Allies Against Google
Vitaly Friedman writes "A report in the Wall Street Journal today talks about how eBay is looking for partners to defend against the growing threat of Google. Specifically, Google Base and the payment system in the works in Mountain View are seen as possible dangers to eBay's auctions and PayPal payment operations, says the report. Google Talk just throws some salt in the wounds by looking for a toehold in Skype's turf."
Huh?
So, you're saying that Steve Jobs should have stated that Google, a non-existant company, was the enemy?
Is that eBay will be forced to stop screwing their customers http://www.paypalsucks.com/ and improve their service.
Oh the joys of competition.
I would too, but not just for the usual reasons that are cited against PayPal. I don't use paypal for a lot of reasons, and one of them is that it is seen as unprofessional. (For example, a professional organization I belong to needs a way to take cc payments over the web, but is too small for a merchant acct. And PayPal makes you look like a doofus, like an aol email addy.) Because Google is so much "cooler" and trendier, it would be easier to get google payment adopted instead of PayPal. I have no idea why PayPal seems so hokey... Is it the name?
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
I actually was willing to learn to type "http://www.google.com" instead of "http://www.altavista.com" to search on Google; even from the outset, no other search engine came close to their level of quality (read: good search results).
Nowadays, Wal-Mart routinely grinds competition unto the dust. Woe betide the small businessman whose future neighbor is a Wal-Mart Supercenter. They're big, monopolistic, anti-competitive, predatory . . . all of the wonderfully evil traits which characterize success in our free enterpise system. This makes them fairly well hated, the price of success.
Nowadays, Google is percieved as the ultimate digital destructor - crushing internet opposition wherever it rises, brutally redefining markets and networking in that fashion most likely to lead to their own growth and the demise of competing technologies.
Either you love free enterprise or you hate it - either way, I wouldn't trust it!
Between the cleaner UI of a bookmarking system, the tagging, and purposefully active userbase I'm hoping fyndr can put a, yeah yeah, web2.0 face on the old web1.0 beast.
Anyone can get one, no technical or professional qualifications needed.
There are plenty of things out there that anyone can get, but don't seem as hokey as PayPal. gmail accounts, myspace accounts (in the right context), etc.. It has more to do with the kind of people that are involved in using the service. The vast majority of individuals using AOL are not regarded by the rest of us as very bright. They are either paying way too much for dial-up, or adding AOL costs to their broadband.
I think PayPal has suffered from the same problem. Outside of eBay use, the only sites that have used it have been completely unprofessional in appearance. This gives us all a collective unprofessional opinion of PayPal. I actually think that PayPal's overall reputation has improved over the last several years and you see more and more legitimate sites using them. I'm not a particular fan of PayPal (even though my buddy Shuanqun works there), but they do fill a need. Competition will be good, reduce costs of both online payments and merchant accounts and hopelly legitimatize the service.
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In fact, I dare you to find a noun you can search for on google without coming up with an eBay add. As near as I can tell, eBay is Google's single largest advertiser. If they want to hurt google, they should start by cutting off some funding.
Possibly because having multiple active accounts is against ebay's terms of service.... :)
Next you should just start selling yourself stuff and pumping your own feedback rating...of course that might look suspeicious so you'll need to open and nurture a whole network of accounts...
Once you break one rule... why not all of them ?
not a liability. Google in the past has been willing to buy companies with a quality product. Bill this to investors as how they can get their money back in a few years.
When they say, "Google would copy it," you say, "as soon as there's the slightest rumor of that, we offer to sell to them. If the product area stays below google's radar, we make money. If it doesn't, then we make our product good enough that they'd be better off buying us." An acquisition is generally a much more likely exit strategy than an IPO anyways.
Furthermore, every good idea doesn't have to be a new company. If you want to make something, and you think google is in a better position to do it, go pitch it to google and get hired. There is as much opportunity for entrepreneurial skill within companies as there is in starting new ones.
--
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"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
According to the WSJ article, eBay faces a difficult conundrum. They are spending millions on targetted search ads on Google, thus helping out one of their direct on-line auction competitors. It's called co-opetition. Personally, I'm disaffected with Google's increasingly unreliable search results and tacky ads. Slashdot has developed a wonderful self-moderating model for it's forum. How about a self-moderating subject index for the web? Maybe as an add-on to wikipedia. In some ways Google reminds me of those German barons of old who were able to charge exorbitant tolls to those needing access to the few bridges across the Rhine. We need more good ways into the Internet, so more power to whatever anyone can come up with, including ask, wikipedia, altavista and msn. What do you think - who can challenge Google? What's the next flavour of the month?
Ebay was good..for about the first year after it arrived. Its just a life support system for sketchy wholesalers and prima-donna powersellers.
The following is an exchange I had with ebay:
Background: We all know power-sellers jack their shipping to cover the cost of them offering stuff at 1 penny. However if you read Ebays ToS this violates it.
I found a seller selling a USB dongle, domestic shipping via USPS (standard air mail, no insurance, etc). After an exchange with ebay, I was told that "Ebay trusts their sellers to set appropriate ship amounts".
Reading their ToS further you discover that its also a violation to list the handling price as a percentage of the final fee. I found several listings by an individual doing just that. I was given the same form letter.
Ebay is junk. They do nothing but protect their power-sellers. Many power-sellers hold feedback hostage. When you feedback like:
Joeblow - item recieved broken, did not respond to e-mails, attempted to call, would not speak with me, etc
Powerseller1111 - BAD EBAYER STAY AWAY!!!
you know exactly what happened. If ebay actually cared about the integrity of its system it would institute a double blind feedback system where each user inputs their feedback then its applied when both have inputed and saved it.
It was another nice idea that got ruined by the internet.