With the release of the third quarter earnings for the year, reports tell us that amazon's up and ebay's not doing so well. These two companies are interesting to look at together because there has been a trend recently of third-party sellers looking to host their goods on amazon over ebay for various reasons. Ebay has been generally the powerhouse for sales of random goods from roller skates to celebrities' garbage, and amazon more of a book/media company. A quick visit to Amazon.com shows that books aren't all they host anymore; with categories like "baby" with the sale of diapers and toys, "Home & Garden" stocking leaf blowers and bbq grills and even a listing of wireless phone plans, I think ebay's feeling the change. Ebay's not doing too well either with their $2.6 billion purchase of skype, whoops!
With all that being said, Amazon also is the talk of the town because of their cheap music and tv downloads. Anyone who has downloaded music from itunes has probably realized that they do a pretty good job of limiting what you can do with their DRM-protected files. For instance, at uni I'm on a network with my house, but I can only authorize 5 computers with my name for them to listen to the music I've downloaded through the itunes shared music service. Also, if I make a CD for a friend with the songs and they try to put them on their computer, the same issue will arise that their computer isn't authorized to listen to those songs. Has anyone realized that amazon lets you do whatever you want with the music you download? I know it's against copyright agreements and everything, but that's the way the world works, people want to share music. Also, there are rumors that itunes dropped the price of their drm-protected downloads to contend with amazon's drm-free download price. Who's getting scared now?!
Scoreboard:
Ebay 0 Amazon 1
itunes 0 Amazon 1
Amazon's the company the big boys are worried about, and frankly they should be.
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