The Wall Street Journal’s Mylene Mangalinda and Robert Guth have an amazing piece fronting the paper today that provides inside detail on how eBay, Microsoft and Yahoo are trying to gang up on Google. eBay, alarmed by the launch of Google Base, is the ring leader, and is willing to open up its millions of auction pages to advertising and throw its online ads to Google’s rivals…if the situation is right.
At the same time, eBay is trying to cut a sweeter deal with Google. While the article breaks no real news, it is a very cool inside look at how the ground rules for competition in the web advertising and ecommerce markets are fluid, hard-to-predict and otherwise made up on a day-to-day basis. It is also more evidence of just how feared Google is, as if anyone needed more evidence on that point.
The article further contains evidence of how worthless those million-dollar, multi-volume McKinsey studies are. eBay apparently wasn’t prepared for Google Base because the McKinsey people told them not to fret.
Few at eBay initially saw reason to fear Google, say people at the company, in part because of a 2003 study it commissioned from McKinsey & Co. McKinsey concluded that Google wouldn’t use its search capabilities to break into e-commerce. That made Google a manageable threat, say people familiar with the study. EBay’s dependence on Google increased as it shifted ad dollars to online ads from traditional media throughout 2004.
Cynthia Brumfield at 7:00 AM|Comments(0)
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