I’ve never made my admiration for Meg Whitman a secret.  She essentially created the eBay we know today and did it while generally keeping the eBay community happy.  A difficult task as anyone who has paid attention over the years knows.

That’s why I find this piece by Saul Hansell of the NYTimes so obnoxious.  He starts by saying…

Before voting for Meg Whitman for governor, California residents would do well to consider what has been happening at eBay since she stepped down as chief executive. John Donahoe, her successor, has pretty much disassembled all of her major strategic moves.

Now the first thing to notice here is whose side Mr. Hansell is taking.  He’s comparing Meg Whitman (whose last year running the company showed a sales increase of 29%) with John Donahoe (whose first year running the company resulted in their first ever quarter-to-quarter sales decline) and is claiming Ms. Whitman is to blame for Ebay’s current state (almost a year and a half after her departure). 

Let’s take another quote…

Mr. Donahoe is excited about one of Ms. Whitman’s acquisitions: PayPal. I’m not sure that this is an unadulterated credit to her, as eBay wouldn’t have had to buy PayPal if it hadn’t been so slow to expand its own credit card payment system.

So even when the results are unquestionably good Ms. Whitman was wrong.  I’ll be the first to admit eBay’s competitor to Paypal was weak but I think Meg Whitman deserves credit for realizing that and bailing when she did.  Plenty of other tech companies have chosen to support their  homegrown variant at any cost and failed because of it.

One last quote…

That’s Mr. Donahoe’s challenge. He needs to find some proposition for the PayPal brand and the eBay brand that still makes customers (both shoppers and merchants) excited, not a drag. If he can do so, that will be something that eluded Meg Whitman for years.

Really?  So this woman, who saw continued success through her entire run at the company, never managed to make customers happy?  Never managed to define the eBay brand?

Right.

Let’s face it, the reason there IS an eBay brand is because of Meg Whitman.  When she took over the company it had 30 employees for God’s sakes.  So painting her as a failure because John Donahoe didn’t know how to capitalize on what he was given is ridiculous.