Attention Mr. Briggs: NOT the best way to silence your competition.

note to fading monopolist: physical intimidation from a once-dominant internet company could be interpreted as a sign of insecurity, and perhaps a lack of any other notable competitive strategy.

companies with great products don't have to bust the kneecaps of their competition... or in this case, the kneecaps of 3rd-party developers building on top of Google's Checkout.

seriously, this story has played itself out before with PayPal & eBay... when are you folks going to learn that trying to forcibly shut up competitive alternatives will only draw greater attention to them?

admittedly i'm a little shit D-list blogger, and my posts don't likely influence your market very much ... but why bother motivating folks like me to write these kind of posts ripping you a new one?  get a clue.

Comments

[Damon Billian]

Hi Dave,

Probably not the smartest move - but one that is probably somewhat understandable. I know that some folks at Google looked at PayPal's backend before Checkout went live, that they pinced away some talent from the Fraud dept. at PayPal, and that they did promise not to be in direct competition with PP (the move looks like one designed to be a direct competitive threat).

That being said,while I may be somewhat biased, I still think the PayPal product has far more functionality than Google's product.

Note: I don't think pulling folks from the convention was a good move. Pulling the advertising from Google, however, may not be as bad as some think (many product searches on google link to ebay on the first page of results).