Software and technology companies used to convene to talk about the threat posed to their business by Microsoft. Of course nowadays, that company is Google, and the scope seems to have expanded to any
company with an interest in making money on the Web.
The Wall Street Journal has learned that eBay, threatened perhaps by the classifieds advertising service Google Base, is now actively
seeking a partner to help it compete more efficiently with the growing threat of Google. The online auctioneer is reportedly in talks with both Yahoo and Microsoft. Unnamed sources close to the matter
say eBay seeks to share ad spending with its chosen partner in exchange for cross-promotion and access to the extensive data the company collects about its users. As it did with AOL last year, whose
business it finally secured further, Google directly addressed eBay with a series of proposals designed to tighten the relationship between the two companies, once it learned of eBay's plan. eBay has
now become the new AOL, shopping its services around to its bigger competitors to protect it from these companies from successfully expanding into services that compete with its core business. Each
company is offering eBay a different package, but advertising is the core of each discussion. eBay doesn't currently advertise on its site in a traditional sense, but the winner would not only receive
a massive amount of new inventory, it would also get ad dollars from eBay, which is one of the Web's biggest advertisers.
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