Question
The CEO explains how the site is all about the "millions of entrepreneurs who maximize their own business on eBay"
Full Story
eBay Items
Yahoo Items
Answer
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Whitman describes it as a "self-regulating marketplace" and points out that it's eBay's buyers and sellers -- not management -- who determine its direction.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
..... and then came 2003, and the sellers lost control of the direction of their own small businesses.
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>It is in some ways a small economy. There are 62 million players [registered eBay members] that meet to do business every single day. The law of supply and demand absolutely works on eBay. A while back, people were saying, "Aren't you concerned that the price of collectibles on eBay is going down?" My answer was "not really." It's an economy: Categories get hot, categories get cold. It's absolutely an efficient market that runs like an economy. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
http://www.shareholder.com/ebay/news...724-114655.htm
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Confirmed Registered Users - Cumulative confirmed registered users at the end of Q2-03 were a record 75.3 million, an increase of 6.5 million sequentially and a 51% increase over the 49.7 million users reported at the end of Q2-02.
Active Users - Active users, the number of users on the eBay platform who bid, bought or listed over the trailing twelve months, increased to 34.1 million, a 57% increase over the 21.8 million active users for the same period a year ago.
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By this figure, if accurate, then about 45.3% of ALL registered users (or ID's) have been active in the last 12 months. This is much higher than I expected. And 34.1 million is a respectable active user base....
But where on earth did she pluck 62 million users coming together every day from???
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>When we hire people, they often don't understand what eBay is. It takes six months for people to actually understand. Often your instincts coming from more traditional companies are wrong. We have to enable the community, we can't direct them. Our community is people, not wallets. The people who end up not being as effective as they otherwise might be are ones that try to control and direct as opposed to listen and enable. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
If only.....
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The self-regulation in the article refers only to the pricing of the market, not legal or ethical matters....
But, whilst I think that Meg is a seriously overrated CEO, she keeps proving that she is the queen of spin.
Kind Regards, Kevin
Answer
She doesn't even have to come up with her own spin. She just reads what we tell her, and parrots it back to the press. In the mean time...
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>The Whitman Rule: "If you can't measure it, you can't control it."<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
From the Fortune article... in Ray's other thread
See, there is a business axiom about that... it goes "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." But when she's talking to her managers, she says "If you can't measure it, you can't control it," and to the press she just parrots back what she reads on the boards and in her emails.
Who is fooled by this???
eBay Items ~~ Yahoo Items ~~ eBay Store ~~ Online Store
Answer
I'm so thankful that eBay exhists but having said that
I can't help but observe that we seem to be living in
an era where persons with power can simply stand and
define a reality that bears no semblance to our actual
experience or what we see right before our eyes!
And the majority of people are ok with it! http://community.here.com/infopop/em...icon_smile.gif
Has it always been this way?
gilda
Answer
Gilda, I suspect that it has always been that way . . . but I don't know if it is worse now, or not.
So many people would rather someone else do their thinking for them . . . and they "look up to" anyone who seems to have achieved what society deems "success".
I like to think that since it is easier than it's ever been to read/study/research and find out things for oneself, that more people are doing that - but I don't know if they are. Maybe it's the same percentage that have always tried to find out for themselves, and no more.
One of the greatest problems in our society is this "hero worship", and the failure of our education system to turn out more people who are curious for knowledge and understanding.
kudzurose (Dorothy)
Answer
You know, Gilda, a friend sent me an interesting article from the Guardian about just that, yesterday. It's about Iraq on the surface, but that's just used as an example of something much larger, and fits in with this conversation.
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Prop-agenda
When I first visited Russia, in 1986, I made friends with a
musician whose father had been Brezhnev's personal doctor.
One day we were talking about life during 'the period of
stagnation' - the Brezhnev era. 'It must have been strange
being so completely immersed in propaganda,' I said.
'Ah, but there is the difference. We knew it was propaganda,'
replied Sacha.
That is the difference. Russian propaganda was so obvious
that most Russians were able to ignore it. They took it for
granted that the government operated in its own interests and
any message coming from it was probably slanted - and they
discounted it.
In the West the calculated manipulation of public opinion to
serve political and ideological interests is much more covert
and therefore much more effective. Its greatest triumph is that
we generally don't notice it - or laugh at the notion it even exists.
We watch the democratic process taking place - heated debates
in which we feel we could have a voice - and think that, because
we have 'free' media, it would be hard for the Government to get
away with anything very devious without someone calling them
on it.
It takes something as dramatic as the invasion of Iraq to make us
look a bit more closely and ask: 'How did we get here?'
How exactly did it come about that, in a world of Aids, global
warming, 30-plus active wars, several famines, cloning, genetic
engineering, and two billion people in poverty, practically the only
thing we all talked about for a year was Iraq and Saddam Hussein?
Was it really that big a problem?
Or were we somehow manipulated into believing the Iraq issue was
important and had to be fixed right now - even though a few months
before few had mentioned it, and nothing had changed in the interim.
In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems
clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.
According to Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber in their
new book Weapons of Mass Deception , it was used to
engineer a state of emergency that would justify an invasion
of Iraq. Rampton and Stauber expose how news was fabricated
and made to seem real. But they also demonstrate how a coalition
of the willing - far-Right officials, neo-con think-tanks, insanely
pugilistic media commentators and of course well-paid PR
companies - worked together to pull off a sensational piece of
intellectual dishonesty.
Theirs is a study of modern propaganda.
What occurs to me in reading their book is that the new
American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated
and pervasive that it really deserves a new name.
It isn't just propaganda any more, it's 'prop-agenda '.
It's not so much the control of what we think, but the
control of what we think about. When our governments want to
sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the
only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about.
And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected
images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages,
weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'.
(What else can the spat between the BBC and Alastair Campbell
be but a prime example of this?)
With the ground thus prepared, governments are happy if you
then 'use the democratic process' to agree or disagree - for,
after all, their intention is to mobilise enough headlines and
conversation to make the whole thing seem real and urgent.
The more emotional the debate, the better. Emotion creates reality,
reality demands action.
An example of this process is one highlighted by Rampton
and Stauber which, more than any other, consolidated public
and congressional approval for the 1991 Gulf war. We recall
the horrifying stories, incessantly repeated, of babies in Kuwaiti
hospitals ripped out of their incubators and left to die while
the Iraqis shipped the incubators back to Baghdad - 312 babies,
we were told.
The story was brought to public attention by Nayirah, a 15-year-old
'nurse' who, it turned out later, was the daughter of the Kuwaiti
ambassador to the US and a member of the Kuwaiti royal family.
Nayirah had been tutored and rehearsed by the Hill & Knowlton
PR agency (which in turn received $14 million from the American
government for their work in promoting the war).
Her story was entirely discredited within weeks but by then its
purpose had been served: it had created an outraged and
emotional mindset within America which overwhelmed
rational discussion.
As we are seeing now, the most recent Gulf war entailed many
similar deceits: false linkages made between Saddam, al-Qaeda
and 9/11, stories of ready-to-launch weapons that didn't exist,
of nuclear programmes never embarked upon.
As Rampton and Stauber show, many of these allegations were
discredited as they were being made, not least by this newspaper,
but nevertheless were retold.
Throughout all this, the hired-gun PR companies were busy,
preconditioning the emotional landscape. Their marketing talents
were particularly useful in the large-scale manipulation of language
that the campaign entailed. The Bu****es realised, as all ideologues
do, that words create realities, and that the right words can over
whelm any chance of balanced discussion. Guided by the overtly
imperial vision of the Project for a New American Century
(whose members now form the core of the American administration),
the PR companies helped finesse the language to create an atmosphere
of simmering panic where American imperialism would come to
seem not only acceptable but right, obvious, inevitable and even
somehow kind.
Aside from the incessant 'weapons of mass destruction', there
were 'regime change' (military invasion), 'pre-emptive defence'
(attacking a country that is not attacking you), 'critical regions'
(countries we want to control), the 'axis of evil' (countries we
want to attack), 'shock and awe' (massive obliteration) and
'the war on terror' (a hold-all excuse for projecting American
military force anywhere).
Meanwhile, US federal employees and military personnel were
told to refer to the invasion as 'a war of liberation' and to the Iraqi
paramilitaries as 'death squads', while the reliably sycophantic
American TV networks spoke of 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' - just
as the Pentagon asked them to - thus consolidating the supposition
that Iraqi freedom was the point of the war.
Anybody questioning the invasion was 'soft on terror' (liberal) or,
in the case of the UN, 'in danger of losing its relevance'.
When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie.
Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought
I should know how it's done so I would recognise when I was being
lied to. I hope writers such as Rampton and Stauber and others may
have the same effect and help to emasculate the culture of
spin and dissembling that is overtaking our political establishments."
· © Brian Eno 2003<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
eBay Items ~~ Yahoo Items ~~ eBay Store ~~ Online Store
Answer
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>One of the greatest problems in our society is this "hero worship", and the failure of our education system to turn out more people who are <I>curious for knowledge and understanding</I>.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
I ran across this site a while back which addresses this issue:
As an observer and student of pseudoscience for thirty years, I have long been puzzled as to why exactly this phenomenon exists at all. Why is anti-intellectualism so pervasive? What possible benefit do people get from clinging to demonstrably false ideas? Why did the same society that flocked to Star Wars decide only a few years earlier that the real adventure of going to the Moon was too expensive to sustain? Given the wealth that innovation and inquiry have brought to our society, why are education and inquiry so grudgingly supported, and so often regarded with suspicion?
Why is there Anti-Intellectualism?
Answer
this line jumped out at me and really said everything we know already about Meg's intentions for eBay....
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR> Focus, focus, focus. Financials. The right people in the right job at the right time. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
of course, I am not sure she has the right people in the right jobs, but I agree with her that running ebay would be different than running a regular biz.
QUESTION: Does Meg really use the word Yeah???
_____________________
Answer
MrPotatoHead - thanks for that link! http://community.here.com/infopop/em...icon_smile.gif It looks very interesting . . . I've bookmarked it to read when I'm not as tired as I am tonight.
kudzurose (Dorothy)
Answer
Excellent reading in this thread & links.
Thanks. http://community.here.com/infopop/em...icon_smile.gif
gilda