Trump reitera prazo para destruir infraestruturas do Irão, mas diz que há hipótese de acordo

[Ulisses Pereira]

"eBay's the Next Apple iTunes, Not Yahoo!"

By Jim Cramer
RealMoney.com Columnist
12/20/2006 8:38 AM EST

"Jeez, did the anti-eBay (EBAY - commentary - Cramer's Take - Rating) machine ever generate a lot of press releases last night. The New York Times Business section leads with a story about how eBay's PayPal is being challenged like never before by Google (GOOG - commentary - Cramer's Take - Rating). Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal has a damning article about initiatives away from core auctions not working.

Is eBay the next Yahoo! (YHOO - commentary - Cramer's Take - Rating)?

How about this: These initiatives, both the allegedly failed site written about in the Times and the PayPal killer from Google are both the reason Google has declined 25% from where it was and the reason, in a great year for the markets, that the stock has been hammered mercilessly.

Now, things are different. The other day when the anti-eBay team tried to paint the China shutdown and transfer as negative, the stock didn't get hit. And as far as Google's initiative, so far all Google has had to do is cut price for it to entice. That's not what you have to do with a truly hot product.

I hated eBay for a very long time. Management arrogance, price increases that seemed suicidal, auction forays by others, all seemed to doom the site.

In the end, though, when the smoke cleared, eBay was still in charge. Its lead had become unassailable.

Let's contrast this with Yahoo!. That company went from being king and kind of proprietary to being a lost-its-way also-ran that seems almost commodity.

eBay's anything but commodity. What all of these negative articles on the company leave out is the "click to call"/Skype launch in 2007. This deal is much bigger than Panama for Yahoo!, another long-awaited product. I would put eBay's "click to call" up there with Microsoft's (MSFT - commentary - Cramer's Take - Rating) Vista.

Plus the auction business is growing again, and I believe that eBay's Christmas will be a good one.

To me, eBay seems like Apple's (AAPL - commentary - Cramer's Take - Rating) iTunes franchise. We saw newspaper blitz after newspaper blitz about iTunes' competitors. Where are they now? Where is Apple?

Yeah, that's eBay in 2007. "

(in www.realmoney.com)