Better Living through Software

Rafat Ali reports that Kijiji has quietly launched in the USA, ostensibly a competitor to Craigslist. Kijiji is owned by eBay, which also owns a big chunk of Craigslist. Just last month, I was talking with an eBay employee who spent the previous year in Shanghai working on Kijiji, and she didn’t give any hints that this would happen. Wang Jianshuo has been with Kijiji from the start, and was one of the first bloggers at MSFT. He just had a baby boy (congratulations!), which may explain why he didn’t blog about the Kijiji expansion.

I don’t know what to make of it. I don’t think this is to compete with Craigslist as Rafat says, but maybe will be used as leverage in partnerships. I agree with Rafat that it doesn’t make sense to have a bunch of competing brands, and would speculate that eBay will eventually settle on one (and that will be Kijiji). But I could be wrong – I have no idea what lessons they learned from the disappointment of PayPal in China; and maybe they have decided that owning a lot of geographically-specific brands is better.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Life at Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.