When eBay started, it liked being a bit scruffy. It let any old Joe make money out of the crap in his garage. It was happy to be the internet's car boot sale - and that image did pretty well for the company. But in recent years, eBay has been hinting that it's morelike Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady - a bit of posh in the guise of a backstreet scrubber; something classier than we ever imagined. How? By buying other companies in an attempt trying to prove that it's got more than just secondhand auctions up its sleeve. Proving that to the public is not coming easy, though, and eBay has been locked in a downward spiral for some time. So when the news emerged today that the company was laying off 1,000 members of staff , it was a disappointment but not a surprise. What used to be an auction house for the rest of us has now become a treasure trove of weird investments and bad decisions. Yes, it made sense to buy PayPal , the internet payment service, for $1.5bn back in 2002. But $2.6bn for Skype, the internet phone company? And $75m on StumbleUpon, which lets users rate web pages and surf to new sites? Rumour has it that eBay's trying to sell off these properties. Perhaps you should wait until the guide price is low enough and make a bid yourself. That's not all that eBay's bosses have done to try and take the company to new heights. They've also fundamentally changed the business that they were in, gouging their biggest fans and unde ...
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