Silicon Insider: How Google and eBay Act Like Nations

In this new definition, eBay has three primary tasks: to maximize the number of items on its site at any one time; to speed and simplify presentations, transactions and deliveries; and support and empower its key "employees," its power sellers.

Right now, eBay is doing only the second moderately well, is starting to slip at the first and is a disaster at the third.

Stuck in the Past

Because it doesn't see itself as a utility, eBay doesn't see what its sellers do: that as the site has gotten bigger and volume grown, and because of Moore's Law, the cost per transaction is supposed to get cheaper, not more expensive. eBay can justify these new rates all that it wants to, the reality is that it violates the expectations of its leading "citizens." And that's why they are talking mutiny.

It's a new world of business out there. Google is preparing for it. eBay is still lost in the past.

This is the opinion of the columnist, and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone is one of the nation's best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News, as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world's largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the best-selling "Virtual Corporation." Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, "The New Heroes." He has been the ABCNEWS.com Silicon Insider columnist since 2000.