Is It Time For eBay CEO Meg Whitman To Go?

Is It Time For eBay CEO Meg Whitman To Go?

We realize this may sound like heresy, but we think it's time for eBay shareholders to consider nudging CEO Meg Whitman out the door.

Meg is one of the Valley's most celebrated and admired executives, and eBay did have an amazing run for a while. But we will not be the first to suggest that Meg may have gotten a bit more credit than she deserved for that: If ever there was a business that mostly grew itself it was eBay. And, in any case, what matters now is the future, and it seems increasingly clear that Meg is not the right person for the job...
In the past few years, as eBay's core business has matured, Meg has overseen several decisions and non-decisions that were, at best, weak:

* Failing to move the eBay brand perception beyond "auctions"--a retailing concept that will forever appeal to only a small segment of the overall retailing market.
* Failing to focus on the core site interface, which for more than a decade has been considered a joke.
* Buying Skype, which never had any real strategic synergy with eBay (despite several years of management insistence to the contrary), which distracted eBay from its core business, and which ultimately disappointed.

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