• Fortune , Thursday, October 5, 2006 11:32 AM

It's been a rough year for eBay CEO Meg Whitman. Wall Street is killing her company's stock. Google has become an even more complicated partner, providing the auctioneer with click-to-call technology, while directly competing with it in payment services and product listings. Yahoo has become a better partner, now showing display ads on its Web sites, and using PayPal as the preferred payment service on Yahoo's sites. Whitman is staying positive. On the Internet, she notes: "The landscape changes quarterly." Which means that ironing out the company's strategy is a mission-critical task.

So how's she doing on that front? Well, the company's stock has been sliced in half since December 2004. Growth has also slowed in its core auction business--expected this year at 27 percent, which just doesn't cut it for a big Internet company. Also, the synergies that were promised between eBay and Skype, its $2.6 billion acquisition, haven't come. In fact, it was only after the partnership announced with Google that the VoIP application has been tied to eBay.com at all. Meanwhile, several of Whitman's top staff have defected, and she herself has said that she would leave the company after about eight or 10 years. In other words--now. But don't expect her to jump ship while eBay is stuck in the doldrums. Despite a complex situation with Google, Whitman says eBay's only choice is to keep moving.

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