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Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

What do people think of Meg Whitman's record at eBay? She ran for governor on her record as CEO there, but eBay has always seemed to me like a terribly-led company, sitting on its laurels as first-mover and squandering opportunities to move into new markets while startups chip away at its core business.

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"a terribly-led company, sitting on its laurels as first-mover and squandering opportunities to move into new markets"

As a former employee of that behemoth, I can only say: you hit the nail on the head.

Completely agree, looking at it from the viewpoint of a seller before Meg ran it into the ground. Yes, you HN Virginia's, she did run eBay into the ground. A simple Google search will turn up plenty of people on plenty of forums that can fill you in. The stock price tells the same story.

Where do you go to auction second hand stuff?

The dumpster. No reserve!

If it's not broken or worthless, charity.

Nothing I have that I don't need is worth the trouble* of selling it.

*ebay

I was doing $40K to $60K of additional income a year selling books back in eBay's prime (late 90's, early 00's), so it was a fairly easy move to the Amazon Marketplace for me. I've been looking for another auction site for a decade now, and haven't found one that compares to eBay in its heyday.

Craigslist.

They do auctions? Thank you, I never realized that.

Hey downvoter, thank you for showing your ignorance. In case you had not read the craigslist faq let me help you out here:

"No - craigslist is not an auction site."

So me not realizing that wasn't all that strange, it seems they really aren't.

Ebay hasn't been an auction site really ever. Today the vast majority of listings have turned it into a ghetto version of Amazon where you can get tons of awful Chinese junk with "Buy it Now" as your only option. For the few people that actually do forgo the direct pricing option, the vast majority set the reserve at the price they'd list it on Craigslist for (basically fair market value) and hope to get extra money for no reason.

The auction format only really existed for vehicle sales in my experience. Even there dealers have killed the functionality by butting out all the private sellers. I wish there was some online option that only allowed private sellers, even Craigslist is succumbing to the same disease.

Auctions are just one way of arriving at a price for a used good, haggling is another. The question isn't "Where can I auction this old stuff" it's "Where can I sell this old stuff".

An auction is a totally different thing than offering something 'for sale', auction sites typically allow people to make bids and enter in to a contract which requires them to take delivery. If craigslist is the equivalent of ebay to you then that's find with me but I think that craigslist and ebay are substantially different beasts.

Also, plenty of the stuff sold there is not old.

Interestingly, eBay is implementing a new policy that requires sellers to offer either no returns at all, or give the buyer at least 14 days. No one except sellers in a couple of narrow categories will be allowed to offer 3-, 7-, or 10-day return periods starting in Q1 2012. So eBay no longer even vaguely resembles a real auction venue where cash, carry, and caveat emptor are the first three rules.

That will obviously kill womens' clothing sales completely, which is a nontrivial part of the company's overall revenue picture.

It also opens up all kinds of amusing arbitrage opportunities (buy gold coins or other assets that fluctuate in value, return them if the market goes down over the next two weeks.)

It also makes me think that eBay needs a good corporate drug-testing policy. Or maybe they're just using the wrong drugs.

What do people think of Meg Whitman's record at eBay?

From her Wikipedia page: During her ten years with the company she oversaw expansion from 30 employees and $4 million in annual revenue to more than 15,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenue. [1]

Seems pretty impressive to me. It's also easy to forget how many companies tried and failed in this space, including the likes of Yahoo.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg_Whitman

The growth is impressive, but did Whitman cause it to happen, or did she manage it as it was happening? My opinion is that she managed it as it was happening. That may make her a competent manager, but I think HP needs much more than just a competent manager. HP should be about technology leadership, especially if the commodity PC business is sold off.

Yes. eBay is a textbook natural monopoly, because buyers want the best selection and sellers want as many buyers as possible to find their stuff. All she had to do at eBay was not screw it up -- which is something, but not the same thing at all as the task she now faces at HP.

You can ask that question about almost any leader, especially non-founder CEOs -- were they just sitting on top for the ride or did they do it themselves. One thing that Meg Whitman definitely executed was the acquisition of PayPal which is now responsible for probably $20+ billion of EBay's enterprise value.

The site is such a 90s throwback. I love getting emails to pay my ebay bill with instructions like "visit the site, login here, click there, then click here, and finally click here." Err, is generating a URL straight to payment such a problem?

I wonder whether this is poor design, or due to the large amount of phishing attempts?

Considering ebay sends me other marketing emails with links in them, I'm not sure if its anti-phishing. Ive already been trained to click on ebay links.

Probably they are trying to prevent phishing/scamming.

OKay, lets assume it is. Why can't I be presented with my balance after logging in? Why do I need to navigate through three menus just to pay them.

Maybe they've fixed it. I havent used ebay in a long time. It became scam central a few years ago and theres no "dont take bids from people with less than 10 feedback" option. Half my shit was bought by someone with zero history who never bothered to contact me.

I agree. The ebay site looked like a throwback to the 90's until a couple of years ago. On top of that it was very slow. Not only startups were chipping away at their business but also Craigslist and Amazon.

The Skype acquisition was simply botched, as someone else mentioned. It is incredible that someone would screw up the legal due diligence on a multi-billion dollar deal.

Also she obviously used the Ebay IPO to get herself appointed on the board of directors of Goldman Sachs.

I completely agree. Meg wasted her time at eBay. eBay is a company and therefore we are not privy to a lot of the internal politics. Their acquisition of Skype made no sense.

When she ran for governor, the method by which she handled the fact that she had hired an illegal immigrant proved to me that she was seriously unfit to be anything but a Senior Manager.

> Their acquisition of Skype made no sense.

For what it's worth: eBay paid $2.6B for Skype in 2005, sold 65% of it for $2B in 2009, and then made an additional $2.5B selling its remaining stake to Microsoft in 2010. So it turned out to net almost $2B over five years. I'm not an accountant, but I could live with those numbers.

(disclosure: eBay owns the company that bought the company where I work)

Skype retained its value and even became more valuable, but that doesn't mean it made strategic sense for a marketplace / e-commerce company.

It made strategic sense if they were hoping to make a couple billion dollars on their investment.

That's not strategy. That's a get-rich-quick scheme.

Getting rich quick is a valid strategical choice. It may not be your thing, but this kind of categorization is personal.

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