Was it a listing surge as eBay’s a$$ covering executives want everyone to believe?

Was it a calculated take down designed to conceal the fact that eBay 2009 4th quarter revenue is already in a serious hole?

Did the insertion of Most Watch code to advertise on seller pages bring the systems down with only normal seasonal listing activity?

Did management forget the holiday selling season starts in November and failed to dedicate sufficient capacity?

Did disgruntled former employees hack the site causing the outage?

Bottom line is eBay’s management lacks sufficient credibility to have any explanation offered accepted as truth.

John Donahoe and his deficient management team have spun so many tall tales that nothing they say anymore is accepted at face value.

It appears that the eBay board of directors, media and stock analysts are the only ones that buy into the tall tales spun by John Donahoe & his management team.

eBay’s sales are not down due to the recession as John Donahoe claims. If sales were impacted by the recession, Amazon and a plethora of sites would not be reporting double digit sales increases.

Buyers still do not believe that checks and money orders are insecure methods of payment, and instead have taken their buying activity to other sites.

Buyers have not bought into Donahoe & Co’s declaration that the destructive innovations imposed across eBay have resulted in improvements.

Time after time, new hoops are erected for sellers to jump through which are described as being necessary to improve buyer confidence in eBay.

The end result is that changes to eBay have been so poorly crafted, miscalculated and ineptly implemented that buyers and sellers stopped coming to eBay entirely out of disgust for what eBay has become.

eBay’s explanation for the outage is nothing more than another poorly crafted, self serving, a$$ covering cover story designed to deflect attention away from the staggeringly incompetent management team.

The unprecedented seller protection, promises of discount coupons, alleged fee refunds for impacted listings etc… is evidence that eBay knows this outage amounts to being the straw that broke the camels back for buyers and sellers alike and they are desperately trying to minimize the damage.

Let’s see if eBay management will fully compensate buyers and sellers as stated, or if once again, buyers and sellers will have to beg and sit pretty to get the compensation that they rightly deserve.

I am betting that there will be widespread problems where eBay attempts to deny feedback withdrawal, listing refunds and buyer coupons to those effected as eBay management seeks to minimize the out of pocket expenses related to making this right.

Any failure by eBay to fully honor the promises of compensation will further illustrate the lack of management credibility and integrity.

Hopefully, when the smoke clears, current management will be swept out the door.

After this incident, this holiday season will likely be the last memory many have of eBay unless new management is brought in to clean up the many issues the current team have created.

I was told by someone that works at a company that is "Google Certified" (with their seal of approval) to sign up web sites in the "Paid" / "Sponsored" section of the Google search. And he told me that in the near future that Google is going to make their 1st results page of the search engine "Paid".

What does that mean? That means that if you want to be listed in Google on the 1st page, you'll have to pay. No longer will search engine optimization, meta-tagging, or any other search engine methods will work on Google.. according to this company.

So, I can believe what Murdoch is saying on this one, and very soon Google will have a lot of webmasters pissed off.

The good news is that Google makes up only less than 28% of the search engines, and getting listed in any web site that's listed in Google's 1st page shouldn't be hard to do.

Kevin