I had a recent discussion with a Skype exec who was telling me how bad the integration with eBay was going, as eBay was such a hierarchical and procedural organization. Hierarchical and procedural? Not something you would expect from a young company like eBay right?

But it is not 2000 anymore. Time has passed. Ebay, Yahoo, Amazon, Google, these organizations are now mammoth struggling with big companies problems like inertia, internal politics, miscommunication, etc…

This Cory Doctorow article on Amazon’s problems with understanding the logic of the download market further confirmed my intuition that we entered a new era: the bus drivers era.

The internet industry is not driven by young hot mavericks anymore. It is now headed by big time CEOs with shareholders, middle managers and a focus on quarterly reports. Their job is to keep their user base satisfied via incremental innovation, not to change the world anymore. The CEOs of the internet industry are now like the CEOs of any industry : they are bus drivers.

Ebay looks more and more like Microsoft. Yahoo currently seems to be as exciting a company as AT&T or GM. Google is slowly cutting itself from users every day. Growth has a price as it forces you to manage a very different set of non value-adding things.

And the web industry is certainly less fun than it used to be.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 6:55 pm and is filed under food for thought, web. 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.