Google Bamboozles eBay

In my book Attacking The Crown Jewels, I describe in detail the bamboozle attack used in strategic competitive defense. Here is the condensed version:

The objective of a bamboozle attack, one of four styles of a crown jewels attack, is to divert your competitor's resources away from the action you fear. You do this by attacking one of his crown jewels, a product so important to his strategy that it must be defended at all costs.

A bamboozle attack is used when you want to own the attack weapon but do not see much revenue potential for your company in its market, usually because the attack weapon does not fit your overall business strategy and model. The idea is to have a lightweight offering that costs you relatively little to keep alive, and that threatens to become a heavyweight competitive threat but never quite gets there.

A bamboozle attack is primarily a marketing activity. For a bamboozle attack to succeed, you must confuse your competitor about your future intentions and make them take the attack seriously because of what it might become, rather than what it actually is. Bamboozle attacks often rely on enthralling industry analysts and pundits with the potential you have to do something wonderful should you ever seriously enter the market. They then become your propaganda squad. It often helps to coyly deny that you intend to compete with your target, all the while making small moves that could be interpreted as heading in that direction. Bamboozle attacks are smoke-and-mirrors ploys, cheered along by a bewitched audience. As in the Wizard of Oz, there is less behind the curtain than you are led to believe.

Google is the master of the bamboozle attack, used to perfection against Microsoft (for more about this, use the blog search function at the top of this page to search for bamboozle). Now those madcap Google bamboozlers have set their sights on eBay. Google wants to divert eBay's resources away from search and search-based advertising. So it attacks eBay's PayPal with Google Checkout and attacks eBay's Skype with its purchase of GrandCentral Communications. This leads to endless commentary by breathless analysts about the wondrous things Google could do with these two attack weapons. The operative word in the last sentence is, of course, "could." Do not hold your breath. Google is all about ad-supported search. All else either feeds that or is one of Google's hobbies, and when a hobby can be used to bamboozle a competitor, all the better.

Meg Whitman, eBay CEO, is familiar with bamboozle attacks. Amazon's Jeff Bezos, that rascal, has been attacking eBay with the unrealized threat of seriously entering its auction business for years. The correct response for eBay to this Google bamboozle is to execute its own strategic plans for search and advertising and not succumb to throwing resources into PayPal and Skype at the expense of those plans. Breath normally, Meg.

Copyright © 2007 Philip Bookman

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