On 2008-02-01, Jon Elson wrote:


Ignoramus19508 wrote:
eBay user base is stagnant, because all people who should have joined,
already joined. Maybe eBay leadership does not understand this
uncomplicated fact.

A while ago, a Wall Street analyst asked a Craigslist executive, what
plans did they have to maximize their profits.

The Craigslist executive's answer was, "we do not have any plans to
maximize our profits".

I found that a little refreshing. Not all companies are concerned with
making as much money as possible.


i

There's this incredibly stupid Business School idiom that to stop
growing is to die. It is amazing how many people believe it. Of
course, for publicly-traded corporations, it is true, because the
imbeciles who run Wall St. demand it, and if you don't show that growth
month after month, your stock will be worth $0.07 a share in no time.
Well, eBay went public, the Whitmans sold their brain child to Wall St.
and bailed, and will go off to Tahiti and live on a sailboat or
something. Good for them, they worked the system and won, but not good
for us who want to use eBay as a useful tool.

Very true. Many corporations ended up on corporate graveyard because
they wanted to grow when they should have just worked hard to keep
existing business going.

My feedback is 99.9%, by the way. One neg out of 900 feedbacks.

i