eBay thinks outside with eBox

hrm. I recently left one of Eric B's teams, and no more than 7 months ago he held a meeting where he said (essentially) that hardware cost more than people's time.

I'm not sure what has changed since then. I still work there (for the next 3 days anyway), and I know the cost structure of people vs. hardware hasn't changed dramatically. Guess it must be the burning desire to catch some of the Facebook "platform" love.

Facebook and Facebook Marketplace probably scares them to death. It's a bad sign if the executives at eBay are so clueless as to only okay this project because they saw Facebook do it.

How does this application reduce their HW & other costs anyway? Seems like they are trying to be like 'me too' with this application... unless I am missing something here.