Amazon, eBay

There is a very interesting article on the competition between Amazon and eBay. It caught my eye in part because I recently had to study eBay c. 1998 for class.

There's a bit in there about long-term planning, and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is now on John McCain's campaign advisory staff, so I suppose some might read the piece as a partial indictment of Republican political choices. I don't think i goes that far, but some might.

In any case, there is a fair amount of criticism of eBay's strategy, a strategy that even today echoes the case I had to read which was rather dated. Some of their acquisitions were bad fits, and there is an ongoing clash with their original culture, a culture based on the facilitation of peer to peer trading rather than large-scaele e-commerce.

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