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Thread: Microsoft plans on buying ebay

  1. #1
    This would seem to fall into the fun-to-speculate-about-but-unlikely-to-happen file: Rumor is rife on the Web that Microsoft is in talks to buy eBay. Why? Well, to better compete with Google, of course. But once you get past that big idea, it's not easy to figure out how owning eBay would help the Behemoth of Redmond do that.

    Okay, it is true that eBay would bring with it one of the biggest, most vibrant, and loyal communities the Web has ever seen. It would also bring PayPal, the only online payment system that ever mattered. (And there still seems to be unlimited potential for PayPal being applied to more and more kinds of transactions.) It would also bring the teeming masses who use Skype...although it remains unclear whether eBay, Microsoft, or anyone else will be able to figure out how to make Skype a cash cow.

    But would any of those assets gird Microsoft for the Great Google War? They wouldn't help it come up with a Google-trouncing search engine. (I've been using Windows Live Search lately, and while it's not without its virtues, it's no Google-killer.) They won't help Microsoft, whose only best-of-breed Web service so far may be Windows Live Local, build Web apps as clever and elegant as Google's best. (As great as it is, eBay is in many ways an old-fashioned site, one that's cluttered with stuff and not particularly quick to use.) And there's no obvious synergy between Microsoft's major business--the selling of operating systems and applications--and eBay's person-to-person marketplace.

    In some ways, the Microsoft-Google war boils down to a single question: Will desktop software paid for by licensing fees be replaced, in part or completely, by Web-hosted services supported by advertising? If the answer is "yes," Microsoft is in for interesting times. But there are probably no easy fixes or silver bullets.

    Maybe there's a scenario in which Microsoft gets all those eBay buyers and sellers, PayPal users, and Skybe gabbers to use more and more Microsoft services, which it monetizes through ads, fees, or a combination of both. But buying eBay, which wouldn't come cheap, with such a vision in mind would be...well, visionary. And none of Microsoft's many acquisitions over the years have been particularly visionary.

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    Guys, as I mentioned in one of the other forms. Microsoft is finding in difficult to beat google. It's vista can't do it, and buying ebay isn't going to help them much either.

  2. #2
    THis is something new!!

    Microsoft is trying to play its monoply move yet again!!

    God!!

    Save us !!

    Endurer....We have yet another entirely new concept added to Microsoft google war!!

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