1. Online auctions were an explosively good business concept, but eBay was hardly guaranteed victory. Both Yahoo and Amazon thought they could bust apart eBay's early lead. They spent a lot of money trying -- yet both failed. You don't win that three-way battle by being a crummy CEO.
2. Meg Whitman understood the fundamental tension of eBay's business model: The company thrived entirely on the success of its users ... yet to be meaningfully profitable, eBay needed to charge those users as much as they could tolerate. She worked both sides of that equation surprisingly astutely, especially in making the Power Sellers feel as if their voice mattered. This wasn't always done perfectly. Users would get angry at times, and fee schedules were always being tinkered with. But she got the big equilibrium largely right -- and that is a lot harder that it looks.
3. Meg Whitman understood how fiercely eBay needed to protect its content. Lots of people wanted to scrape eBay listings. Various auctions aggregators hoped to become the equivalent of Priceline or Expedia in the airfare/hotel markets. Meg and her lawyers made it costly and then impossible for the aggregators to get anywhere. (More detail here: eBay v. Bidder's Edge) That was nasty but necessary. Had she not taken that tack, modern-day eBay might be someone else's doormat.
4. By and large, Meg hired well. Not every new person worked out, and some positions needed to be filled repeatedly before they were filled right. But eBay kept upgrading its management team sufficiently so that it could handle crazy-fast growth without falling apart. That also is harder than it looks.
Back in 1998-2001, I covered eBay for The Wall Street Journal and Fast Company. That meant visiting the company repeatedly, using the site a lot and regularly interviewing all the high-level players (Whitman, Omidyar, Skoll, Westly, Kagle, Webb, etc.) Not to mention making the rounds with power users, customers, competitors, non-famous employees, etc. It was a good way to see how the company grew, stumbled, and grew some more. Here's what struck me about that period:
การประมุลออนไลน์เป็นแนวคิดทางธุรกิจที่ดี แต่ eBay ไม่รับประกันชัยชนะ ทั้ง yahoo และ amazon คิดว่าพวกเขาสามารถ