eBay at five: Babe or brat?

Folks all over the world have discovered the reigning auction venue and have turned it into an Internet experiment-turned-gold mine for the site's creator, Pierre Omidyar.

Now, with five years' operation under its belt, I have to wonder if it's a site that's on the rise or poised for a fall. Although growing pains were to be expected, eBay (ebay) has shown signs of big business self-destruction that longtime users have decried, bemoaned and foretold.

In its inaugural days, eBay (then known as AuctionWeb) tapped the potential of transforming the Internet from a chatting space to a trading space. Everyone seemed to have some sort of junk to sell, and many more seem to be questing for some odd knickknack or relic.

Although the site was originally launched to unite collectors of Pez candy dispensers, a word-of-mouth user base grew quickly and turned the site into the world's largest online white elephant sale. And it was good.

But within a few years, eBay had grown so large that Omidyar realized he had a bona fide corporation on his hands and sought out a bona fide CEO to take the reigns (he being just a Net geek at heart). Enter Meg Whitman, a corporate whiz from recent stints with Disney and Hasbro. Meg could don the power colors and take the site to new heights, while simultaneously waging war on Jeff Bezos' tribe at Amazon.com.

Whitman certainly changed things, but has she been savior to the site or an unexpected femme fatale?

Growth became the priority, fraud an issue to duck, and shareholders the most important audience to be served. But what about the sellers -- those devoted folks who claimed eBay as their squatting ground and populated the site with the millions of neat things that attracted bidders and generated the sales commissions that made up eBay's bottom line? Well, they're all very nice, but partnerships and acquisitions were what Whitman and Co. believed would propel the quirky site to heights of grandeur and ... er ... megalomania?

No doubt, eBay has grown, but rather than growing with its founding user base, it's grown away from it instead. Controversial spinoffs such as eBay Motors, middle-of-the-night fee increases such as the "it's only a dollar" reserve-price debacle, competing banner ads on sellers' auction pages, and bizarre approaches to copyright protection via the vigilante-style VeRo program have all made eBay appear more adversary than advocate to its devoted minions.

"The minds that planned cared nothing for the hands that toiled." -- "Metropolis," 1927

eBay has now graduated to the same glitz and gaudiness of the local mondo-mall, with all the neon, Muzak and other distractions that keeps shoppers from achieving their original goal: finding an item they want to buy.

For sellers, eBay's bent toward growing, proliferating and branding is ravaging its erstwhile land-of-opportunity draw for entrepreneurs eager for a new way to start a small businesses. Their happy (and profitable) little strip mall is being crowed out by unwelcome corporate mergers and mission statements aimed at raising stock prices yet diminishing the charm and allure of the once nifty and revolutionary new way to buy and sell.

Now, at five years old, eBay strikes remarkable resemblance to a large-headed, top-heavy toddler whose every step is negotiated with wobbly unsteadiness -- insisting it can manage on its own, of course.

How will this child mature? It's uncertain from my point of view since the site's listening ability appears impaired. Until eBay hears its community and heeds their counsel, it could wind up a prolonged case of the Terrible Twos.

And Heaven help us all when eBay moves into defiant adolescence.

Dennis L. Prince is author of "Online Auctions @ eBay" and a regular contributor at AuctionWatch.com. His birthday's in November; send congratulations or condolences to his e-mail address.