She can ride… – a bicycle.

The recent issue of Businessworld has an interesting insight on the symbiotic relationship between eBay the company and eBay the community [membership login required]. Providing a sort of loving insider’s view of the economy model of eBay, it provides tremendous insights into how service delivery platforms are influenced in unthinkable ways by end user consumption of services. What started off as a trivial buy-n-sell forum is in many cases the bread-earner for families. In a fascinating number of instances, the power of eBay the model has been brought across to the board members of eBay the company. So why talk about eBay today ?

Simply because for a economy model that revolves around a broad base of user community, it is important for the focal company to be agile and receptive to ideas. The experiences of eBay are not of User Driven Innovation (something that I keep on talking about ever so often) but of User Focussed Business Model. In a service driven economy, the variables of service delivery (from operations to processes) can be replicated and provided at a knockdown cost. What remains as the only differentiator is the way in which flux is handled. eBay has learnt its lessons (and still learning them) by burning its fingers once too often. But what sets eBay the company apart is the eagerness to respond to user pressure. Success in a community based model is really a measure of the user footprint. Being nimble enough to respond and being sensitive enough to properly convey the message is required. Long back when we were discussing about productisation of FLOSS services consultancy, the only thing that kept nagging was the means of differentiation and the focus area of the consultancy. Looking back, I can see how naive we were. The differentiation onus is not on the parent but embracing the practical feedback is the parent company’s.

And perhaps this is one way the Indic L10n process model can grow…