Thoughts regarding Meg Whitman

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 company for almost 10 years, making it a huge success. Beyond the natural growth of eBay, Whitman did 2.5 very important things:

1. Bought eBay(s) around the globe and created a huge global operation [eBay was the first to validate the model of "copycat in Europe, then sell to the original in the US. Will be interesting if Facebook will follow the same path of international growth].
2. Acquired Paypal, and helped eBay directly and the venture capital market indirectly [as Paypal is responsible for a wide range of startups including You Tube].
3. Meg also gets 0.5 points for buying Shopping.com: Good for eBay, Great for the Israeli Internet market scene. [Update – yesterday Paypal announced the acquisition of Fraud Sciences, another Israeli startup]

Clearly, her biggest mistake was the acquisition of Skype (Although she talked about it on Techcrunch, and claimed it's the loss of Japan). A lot has been written about it (Check here and here). More than anything, it seems that eBay is another casualty of Web 2.0. On one hand, eBay is the original Web 2.0 Company. If Amazon was all about the online version of Macy's, eBay was the real consumer-2-consumer shopping. However, it always missed the social aspect. Skype was an interesting attempt to fix that. So was the Stumble Upon. Overall, eBay is still the same as it was a few years ago. That's not true about the users, as many moved on.

Overall, the big winner of Web 1.0 is Jeff Bezos. Still successful, still leading his company. I have heard a few people talk about the open opportunity in reinventing e-Commerce. Maybe Amazon will be the loser of Web 2.5.

Comments

[Avishai]

Daniel,

How long do you think this has been brewing over at ebay?

This has been discussed for a while but it seems that it was clearly coming when more and more of her schedule was dominated by fundraising for Mitt Romney.

There are also murmers of the impact of John Donahoe stepping in on many of the senior people there. We may be seeing a generation transition.

[Ori Lahav]

eBay - The Giant that stopped growing.
eBay is a great business and really the first web 2.0 company that gave the power to the community. however, I think they took it too much to the extreme and their community (mostly of sellers) simply did not let them change and adjust.

I guess, this giant became so stuffed and wealthy, and simply fell a sleep when other little ones just stepped into it's close garden and stole all the apples (i.e. Etsy).

I totally agree with you on that Danny.