Open source has made a significant impact on the "offline" world of packaged software, but it's arguably having a more important impact on the web world. In the latest sign of the importance of openness to development in a SaaS world, eBay announced that it wil be opening up its Selling Manager auction tool to outside developers:
"Opening eBay.com directly to third-party applications through the Selling Manager gives developers an immediate channel to growth-minded eBay sellers," [An eBay spokesman said].
eBay's new program is only in its nascent stages of development. But the company says its pro sellers that already use advanced selling features in Selling Manager will be able to find and subscribe to third-party tools the same way they do now for eBay-developed tools.
This is really cool. Facebook, MySpace, and a range of others have been increasingly opening their platforms to outside developers, making the web a bit less like a series of silo'd fiefdoms and more like a communal pool of code.
It's very likely that in a few years time we won't think about open source as a strategy for opening up packaged software, but rather a strategy for making web applications richer and more relevant to a wider body of people. The business models behind open source will change in the process, as Stephen O'Grady suggests.
I suspect that a heck of a lot more money will then start changing hands. Good times....
Nick Carr asks today, "Is eBay a fad?" Nick's source of inspiration is a BusinessWeek article noting that more and more sales on eBay are through fixed-price sales, rather than auctions.
"If I really want something I'm not going to goof around [in auctions] for a small savings," says Dave Dribin, a 34-year-old Chicago resident who used to bid on eBay items, but now only buys retail.
I think the larger problem is that the "savings" have been somewhat nonexistent for some time. It used to be that you could find deals on eBay. Today, those are fewer and farther between as eBay has become a haven for "real" merchants rather than Aunt Louise selling her handmade doilies.
This, coupled with the amount of effort that goes into eBay's auctions - first you have to dig through the site to find what you want, and then you have to sit around waiting for the auction to close, only to be outbid by software set up to win the auction in the final few seconds - make eBay a raw deal.
I personally feel like the right model will be one where sellers find buyers, not buyers finding sellers.
... Read more
The web offers businesses almost unlimited commercial potential. The primary thing limiting that potential, however, is trust (or, rather, a lack of it). How do I do business with a stranger online? eBay has come up with its own answer, but it hasn't worked out as well as hoped, as Nick Carr notes:
By providing buyers and sellers with a simple means for rating one another, eBay has been able, we've been told, to avoid lots of rules and regulations and other top-down controls. The community, built on trust and fellow-feeling, essentially manages itself. Tom Friedman, in his book The World Is Flat, voiced the common opinion when he called eBay a "self-governing nation-state."
Nice story. Too bad it didn't work out.
The reason is self-interest, which doesn't always mesh well with other-interest. This is absolutely a problem with impersonal systems like eBay. It is not, however, a problem with true social networks (which map one's social graph, rather than promiscuously adding "friends" Facebook-style).
... Read moreeBay is planning to write down $1.4 billion in Skype-related charges, reports the Wall Street Journal.
The Internet auction giant said the charges include $530 million to complete payments related to its 2005 acquisition of Luxembourg-based Skype. The other roughly $900 million in charges reflect goodwill impairment due to "the updated long-term financial outlook for Skype."
This is too bad, since the Skype service has so much promise, and Skype could fit nicely with someone else. I never could understand the alleged synergies between the two, but now that I'm a happy Skype user, I hope eBay figures out where to put Skype, because it's really quite a good system (better than Vonage, I'm finding).
How about Skype + Cisco? Or Skype + Microsoft, for that matter? Or, really, Skype + anyone besides eBay? :-) Seriously, the deal was driven by hype - it was a case of eBay wanting to buy something hot to juice its then sagging sexiness. It didn't work, but eBay is chugging along, anyway.
I saw this on Digg and just had to laugh. Someone just paid $61.00 for a copy of OpenOffice on eBay. They probably thought they were getting a great deal which, of course, they were. They just didn't realize how much better that deal could have been. :-)
(Credit:
eBay)
I'm an advisor to Bungee Labs and am spending the day with the company (along with other advisors from Sun, Amazon, etc.). I'm not a developer myself, and so focus more on the community-building activities of the company, but they mentioned an incident at the eBay Developers Conference that I found fascinating.
eBay developed a new eBay Shopping Web Services WSDL. They stopped by the Bungee Labs booth and asked what the company could do with it.
... Read moreBy dragging and dropping components and objects, [Bungee] had a simple application running in minutes. The application had an input field to specify a search query. When you clicked the search button, the query results (item title, gallery URL, View Item URL, etc.) were displayed on the form.
Start to finish, this all took less than 20 minutes. Not bad for working with a new API. And, as [Bungee] pointed out, we never left the web browser!
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