eBay's biggest problem is its bigness. It takes in the big picture pretty well, understands how things look from the top down. However, eBay is so large and unwieldy at this point is that its perspective is so far up that individual users like us, at best, look like ants — if we are visible to them at all.
The decisions that eBay makes appear to make sense from that perspective, even if they appear to make no sense to us, who are at the base of the pyramid, not the pinnacle.
I think that sense of alienation between the top and the bottom of the pyramid is the core of every serious problem that eBay has, and that this has been the case for a long time. Corporate literally does not understand how things look at the level of the day-to-day individual user. Conversely, we individuals have a very hard time understanding how things look from the top of the pyramid — and there's ample evidence of this every day in this forum.
This isn't an exact analogy, but I am reminded of a line attributed to Stalin: "A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."
But what are you going to do? eBay is a large, publicly-traded corporation and the board is answerable to the shareholders, who just want to make money. It's just the nature of the beast.
That's why I argue that in one sense, the worst thing that ever happened to eBay is that it went public. At that point, there was no going back; it was inevitable that its old, funky, niche-market character was going to fade away as management chased sales growth, or whatever metric Wall Street was focused on, to drive up the stock price.
Whatever complaints I have about Kickstarter, I will say this for Perry Chen: He gave an interview to The Verge last year in which he swore that Kickstarter would never go public, because it has a specific purpose, a specific mission and he doesn't want to deviate from it because of pressure to grow. Going to stay a Public Benefit Corporation as long as he has anything to do with it. I think that's good business, because Kickstarter's distinctive identity is all about serving niches, projects that can't get funded through other means. Lose that identity, Kickstarter loses its brand.
Even though you can still find the stuff that defined eBay in the early days (like what I sell) if you poke around enough, eBay has allowed its brand to dissipate by becoming too big and diffuse. When you lose your brand like that, you have to work all that much harder to convince people to buy from you. Who are you? Why should people pay attention to you? When this was a place to sell Pez dispensers and potato chips with Jesus' face on them, it was a lot easier to answer than question that it is now.
That, I think, is the root of all of eBay's current problems.
