Meg Whitman for Governor? Why on Earth? Give me even one reason. Another bored greedy executive with a radically inflated sense of their own talents throwing just a splash of the billions they made fleecing the public at another game they think, unwisely, they just may be good at. I will be writing more, much more, about this in the future.
But, let's just start with her experience. Basically, she ran eBay from a small friendly little auction house into to a very large loosely supervised, customer ignored and vicious Big Company.
Her biggest single accomplishment was to buy Skype for 3 billion, spend hundreds of millions to develop it only to see it sold as a disaster by the management who replaced her. Her second biggest deal was to buy a minority interest in Craigs List, through a dirty little back room transaction, where eBays involvement was unwanted, destructive and, finally, abandoned.
She did, in her favor, make the decision to buy PayPal. However, the developer of eBay, after spending time inside the eBay inferno, got disgusted and decided to take his most valuable commodity, creativity, with him. He is now selling the much sought after fast and electric Tessla cars he dreamed up, designed, built and is now selling faster than he can produce.
I wonder what eBay might have been like if he had been encouraged to stay and contribute under Whitman.
Whitman was so popular with eBay users that two years ago they canceled, and have never rescheduled their very popular and heavily attended annual conference/convention. The reason for the permanent cancellation? Too many eBayers were so upset with Whitman, the eBay "Community" of computers, and the general environment of "screw the users" that there were almost open riots when the users actually got to speak to a real person from eBay.
For a flavor of what I am talking about, just visit the eBay forums and see if you can go back as far as Whitmans' time and get a feel for the really pissed off customers in the eBay Community. Or you could just post a question asking about Whitman, at least you could before eBay hired some people to delete any negative comments from the forums.
It might not have been necessary to start deleting comments if, instead, they had hired some real people earlier on to talk to users instead of requiring all input to be in the form of messages that were subsequently read, interpreted and responded to by eBay computers....which is why the answers never really seemed to fit the original question. Or how about the quality control questionaires.."tell us how we are doing"....that were multiple choice with no place for negative comments or notations.
I can only dream what California might turn into if Whitman has her say. I can only dream bad dreams. Very bad dreams. Maybe the Terminator couldn't make much of a dent on California, but anybody that could create a wicked, vicious culture out of something as neat as the eBay concept probably can also do some serious damage to California. The only hope for California might turn out to be the Do Nothing political bureaucracy that has so frustrated the current governor and manages to stymie change at every turn.
California, as bad as it already is, does not need Meg Whitman. Thanks, Meg, but just take your Billions you earned off fleecing eBay users and go find another place to entertain yourself. Oh, and you might want to think about actually exercising your responsibility as a citizen to vote.
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