Pros
* First to market as significant online market. * Has huge market volume, trading data, and user community. * Has significant resources to employ, and commands many aspects of trading (finance, advertising, inventory (via seller community), international expertise). * eBay supports the community. A lot of people can make their living off this marketplace, and many more people can supplement themselves, or their businesses. Its a great venue for a good many different niche markets. * eBay is a pretty green company, if anything this might be a little understated.
Cons
* eBay as a marketplace is easy to game unfairly, likewise excellent contributions within the organization will likely be attributed to somebody else, or more likely ignored or significantly under supported and appreciated. Success is not what you can do but, "how you play the game." * "Playing the game," means supporting upper management initiatives the technological or methodological flavor of the day initiatives and getting credit for being the loudest and most loyal proponent. Many of these initiatives are absurd on the face of it, others eventually play out to some kind of clearly detrimental effect. The principals behind the initiative are simply lost, people thoughtlessly apply what they are told to to the point of actual contradiction with those principals. * When you read about a demoralizing management practice at amy large American software company, you know its an issue at eBay ( e.g. stacked ranking of individual contributors, over reliance on contractors, too many layers of management, frequent meaningless changes in structure and responsibility, not-intented-here syndrome, innovation only by acquisition). * eBay is so successful at metrics of the 0.5% accumulative gain, that it simply cannot see significant opportunity before it. Its as though game changing ideas simply do not apply at eBay because 500% better just does not fit on their scale or a community member or another technology group will object to the change.