Today’s Wall Street Journal said eBay (Quote: EBAY) has signed a deal with Google (Quote: GOOG) to allow the internet search giant to display text ads on eBay’s (Quote: EBAY) non-US auction sites. The amusing thing here is eBay (Quote: EBAY) signed a similar deal with Yahoo! Inc. (Quote: YHOO) to allow Yahoo (Quote: YHOO) to display ads on eBay’s (Quote: EBAY) US sites. Meanwhile, Google (Quote: GOOG) and Yahoo (Quote: YHOO) are at each other’s neck vying for global internet search domination. The myriad of recent alliances are making me nauseous while wondering if they’re really worth it.

Google (Quote: GOOG) with Dell Inc. (Quote: DELL), Google (Quote: GOOG) with News Corporation’s (Quote: NWS) Myspace, Microsoft Corporation (Quote: MSFT) with Facebook, and Youtube with Paris Hilton (what the?!?). It seems these companies, well Microsoft (Quote: MSFT) definitely, are run by over-the-hill old men who do not understand the trendy technology and the young generation of internet users that are driving the traffic. These companies are just trying to eat up the first hot internet concept, afraid they’d be left in the dust. If they didn’t get to it first, they try to make alliances. In eBay’s (Quote: EBAY) case it doesn’t matter with who as long as these other giants don’t put eBay (Quote: EBAY) out of business. Wouldn’t the best scenario, then, for everyone to be allies with everyone else and create a big monopoly and divide up the pie. Oh wait, then do we keep Yahoo (Quote: YHOO) or Google (Quote: GOOG)?

Keeping on track with eBay (Quote: EBAY), however, it still looks like a sinking ship to me. Alienating the very merchants they base their business on to temporarily put a band-aid on their financials is just a disaster waiting to happen. What will eBay (Quote: EBAY) do when all of its big merchants and store owners (who are being forced to take their cheaper store listings over to the more expensive auction listing) move to other auction sites or just start their own site?

And all this Hype about Skype (heh) still seems to be hype as it is unclear how paying so much for Skype, a free service, will bring in revenues. The attractiveness of Skype is that its free, and eBay (Quote: EBAY) probably bought it because it thought it was attractive. But oh yeah eBay (Quote: EBAY), its based on a free service model. Even if they integrate Skype by allowing customers to contact merchants, you could’ve done that with a little R&D. So, Skype, still the worst buy EVER! How can we trust an auction site who can’t even buy things right? All criticisms aside, I’d really love to see where eBay (Quote: EBAY) is in a couple of years But its sure fun to watch Google (Quote: GOOG) make deals with all walks of the net.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 28th, 2006 at 6:44 am and is filed under Non-Stocks, Stocks, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.