Next up at TechCrunch, how Twitter killed Google... Twitter rumored to be acquiring Apple... Apple rumored to be releasing a budget mp3 player priced at $10... How TechCrunch killed the entire newspaper industry...
Seriously. It's just getting ridiculous now. TC - get back to reporting news - you know, facts.
paypal was acquired in 2002, he continued on at eBay for 3 weeks.
This is not evidence that he knows what he's talking about wrt why eBay is dying.
eBay's current pain has nothing to do with "fun" or "the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook and the likes of YouTube", and everything to do with trying to become amazon (via ebayexpress) and google (via the never publicly mentioned K2 project).
I'd argue that Amazon has a larger hand in killing eBay than anything else. After the initial surge of "let's sell every used thing on eBay" was over, it became a marketplace for, well, businesses that sell new stuff.
In the end eBay was just a discount portal to new products - and Amazon did that one a million times better, in terms of selection, ease of use, security, and customer service. I mean this from both the consumer and seller perspectives.
eBay becoming a portal for discounted goods was a direct result of the desire of Meg to compete with amazon. It was remarkably stupid.
If eBay would've listened to many of its employees re: shipping fees, fraud, and something called the ePD; eBay would have owned the used good marketplace.
Instead they largely ignored fraud, and graft; let the core auction platform languish (with the most bizarre rationalization that I ever heard); and in end simply pissed away community goodwill and internal resources competing with ghosts.
eBay will slowly rot because of this stupidity. Good riddance indeed.
Seriously. It's just getting ridiculous now. TC - get back to reporting news - you know, facts.