Skype is back in business after its service outage last Thursday, for a period up to 36 hours, and this caused million of users can’t logged in to the service last week. Though this morning I read eBay’s explanation (English) and (Mandarin), I believed many users still wondering what was the main reason that caused this worst outage in Skype’s five year history. Unlike any other service disruption, Skype said the disruption was due to a large number of Skype users restarting their computers after installing the routine Windows update on the second Tuesday of every month. In Skype’s post, they didn’t mentioned precisely what in particular about the August’s update has led to the Skype crash and indeed this kind of vague explanation on this issue outlines the necessity of another round of explanation.

“Windows Updates” was the key feature of Microsoft’s OS strategy. It cost Microsoft a certain amount of money to set up their team in developing the security patches in a “periodic” time frame in spite of us, as the users sometimes didn’t realized whether these updates really meet our own computing demand. However, for Skype service outage, and their explanation for this was due to the Windows periodic updates nonetheless remained controversial. Will it served as an unexpected boon to some of the Skype peer-to-peer competitors? Well, time will tell.

For the Facebook users, they just have their own choices to bypass the online auction and sales sites in order to sell goods directly from their profile pages due to the launched of Garage Sale platform by Buy.com. Garage Sale is a new online shopping site that allowed friends in a same Facebook’s contact group to trade their goods for the money. For this service, Buy.com will charge a flat 5% commission on any completed sales. This contrast to eBay where they charge sellers a listing and final transaction fee. However, all Facebook users must use credit cards to pay for the items, and the sellers can only get their money via eBay’s PayPal accounts or through checks from Buy.com.

“As the first company to market with this embedded e-commerce capability, we see tremendous growth opportunities in providing the millions of users on business and social networks with an alternative to eBay and the ability to transform their personal profile pages beyond information-sharing.” According to a Buy.com’s press release. This is fairly easy for Garage Sale to convince people that they’re offering a better facility to trade by combining the power of Facebook platform, with the aim also to compete with the likes such as eBay.

Still, this Garage Sale is based on the technology, i.e. RightCart from Shoperion that Buy.com acquired earlier this year.

EachNet is a new platform that jointly founded by eBay and Tom.com in China, and now it has opened to the public. As announced on EachNet’s community forum (in Mandarin), the existing eBay China users are required to re-activate their membership on this new platform. The existing and previous eBay platform in China, i.e. ebay.com.cn will be shut down permanently after this coming 10th July, as stated in their Memo. A bit sad to read this type of news after I examined the history, the growth, the launched of eBay’s platform in China in September 2004, and the fall of this great Internet company in China.

The shift from the wholly-owned to a joint-venture EachNet platform reminded us many things, overseas market, not to mention China alone, most companies will face the cultural shock that they ever imagined. I’m not agreed to a statement that joint-venture is the only business model that one Internet firm can work on in China, this type of statements can be misled, I rather believe the management theory of “distance still matter,” how easily things can go terribly awry in overseas markets.

See also my June 2007 post on eBay China, entitled, “New eBay China Platform Launches.“

A few days ago, I just wrote a post that talked about the new eBay EachNet platform, now another eBay China platform is goes live. A bit of confuse here when you visit the existing eBay China home page, i.e. ebay.com.cn, it was still available for this moment. However, as stated in the landing page of this eBay China platform, this is a platform that designed as a marketplace or community for the eBay buyers and sellers to conduct international trade, not the one for the online auctions. That one will be a platform jointly funded by eBay and Tom.com.

I recalled eBay’s motto, “We believed people are basically good,” and this new platform will build a solid foundation to facilitate open and honest communication among the buyers and sellers around the globe, a huge goal for eBay China to create an open market that encourages honest dealings. Thus, you’ll noticed that several tools are available on this new platform, such as international trade education, they named it university; learn about paypal; vendor search list; and the community help boards, a know-how discussion forum for the vendors.

I think it was important for eBay to build few platforms that cater to different needs of people in China, due to a fact that one-for-all is no longer a viable business strategy for eBay. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for another platform that will be jointly managed by eBay and Tom to goes live. That one is designed purposely for the customer-to-customer (C2C) trading.

In April, I did posted a post that entitled, “Tom eBay China To Be Launched In July,” and now the new platform is goes live, with the domain name is as follow: kaifa.tom.com, and the platform is shown in the above picture. The domain name chosen became quite profound to me: Are eBay is going to destroy the goodwill of EachNet? However, at this moment while I access to EachNet.com, it will bring me to the eBay China’s home page.

What sets EachNet apart is it was the first China’s online auction platform. Founded in year 1999, eBay first partnered with EachNet in March 2002, and increased its investment in EachNet in June 2003. Later in July 2003, eBay completed the EachNet investment, amounted to a total $180 million of cash in acquired EachNet.