Certainly it will take more thought as to what6 EBay really is, but EBAY does provide and open, proprietary architecture, where buyers and sellers gather to utilize the architecture. I think open and proprietary architecture is clearly in place. Amazon offers one itself, Yahoo! offers one themselves, various niche marketplaces offer their own open and proprietary architectures. But clearly, EBAY is dominant and getting more dominant by practically any measure imaginable.
So the next question is whether or not there are high switching costs. For most users there are not. They can just decide to go to the store if they lose interest. No big effect on their life. For sellers, however, talking the core users, the switching costs would appear to be quite high, so high that switching may be a decision to go out of business as no other open and proprietary market architecture has such a large audience as to be able to support their businesses were they to have to switch.
I think, at least for the core users, the switching costs are quite high.
As for the industry standardizing around EBAY's architecture, each new participant accomplishes this on a much grander scale than anything anyone else can offer, perhaps than anything all the others combined can offer and then some.
As for other businesses hooking into EBAY as Tom has provided some information on, that would be another source of industry standardization, and clearly Amazon and Yahoo! are not going to be beneficiaries of this trend. Therefore, EBAY is the industry standard, should this opportunity, currently in the chasm, take off.
I'd have to say, looking at it, that EBAY has at least the definitional qualifications, with a straight forward analysis, to qualify as a Gorilla (assuming it originally Tornadoed). Whether or not each element if examined closer would hold up is another issue.
Clearly, whatever it is, EBAY is going to have to grow outside its core base to justify its present valuation, just as Cisco has to grow outside of its core router business to continue growing, so that provides risk, but EBAY would seem to have some inherent advantages, as say like MSFT had, or INTC had, in moving into these non-core markets. Still creates some risk though.
Tinker |
