Econometrics is pretty valuable for any of the data-mining operations. Most econ majors I know are really good with stats and enjoy digging into datasets almost obsessively. I'd certainly hire them. Good economists also have a well structured way of reasoning through problems.
As the article says, Varian, author one of the more mathy econ intro text (imo haven't sampled all) has been at Google for quite some time now.
So yeah...why not?
Many economists are applied mathematicians and the microeconmics crowd is specifically focused on understanding consumer and firm behavior. This checks out.
Sounds like tech companies are normal companies after all. The ebay example is pure finance/controlling and while the analysis might be convoluted and involve some statistics, I bet the driver of that kind of thinking is finance, or pricing, or basically a department that would be very normal in more established companies.