Anablog

Boycott eBay this week. I used to love eBay. I bought a ton of test equipment on eBay and sold a ton of Harley parts. But like so many software-focused companies, they have slowly morphed from great, to good, to problematic to evil. Other modern versions of the Robber Barons are, of course, Microsoft, and now Adobe, who make a pdf reader so complicated it crashes your CAD workstation. I use Foxit instead. One of the earliest software-pig companies was AutoCAD (AutoDesk, to be accurate). They had a near monopoly, got haughty and arrogant and treated their users like dogs. I fired up my old copy of AutoCAD 14 last year and the printing methodology was so arcane I could not get a sheet of paper with he drawing on it. AutoCAD got slapped by SolidWorks, which is great for mechanical CAD and I also love TurboCAD, which can do mechanical but is more suited to slap AutoCAD out of the architecture market where AutoDesk has had a monopoly. I think the only poor slobs that still put up with AutoCAD are the lonely GIS market where the users were foolish enough to write a bunch of custom LISP code. Just like Microsoft has only one business model—to lock you into its products so they can abuse you, AutoCAD tried that but only succeeded partially. Yeah Solidworks, Yeah Unigraphics, yeah TurboCAD.

Now eBay is getting that same rapacious character as the mainline software giants. At the core of this problem is that while software companies have to try and use market power to lock you in, software “engineers” use insane complexity to insure you will need a LOT of them to do anything. Add to that the normal layer of Italian-suit parasites that descend on any pot of money, the lawyers, the HR people the finance dorks, and well, I guess eBay thinks it it is OK to swipe about 20 percent or so from every transaction (if you use PayPal as well). Perhaps they should look to craigslist to see how little it takes to run a server and create a community of happy users.

So there you have it, as the Emperor said in Amadeus. eBay just keeps raising their rates and worse yet, breaking things that used to work. They just revamped the eBay Motors site, and all my saved searches broke. How can I find a Studebaker or a Corvair now? I wrote them and they told me to just redo all the searches. Cold-hearted pigs. The topper is that many of the searches, where I sorted a certain way, cannot be duplicated. Then after a few weeks of suffering I note there is a tiny opt-out link that lets you go back to the old eBay Motors. Of course, it did not work in my Opera web browser, but a few nasty notes mentioning needing to write their legal consul and at least I could go back to the way things were.

Nope, boycott eBay, don’t sell, don’t buy and don’t even look for the week of February 18 2008.