eBay was a fad?

So says Nick Carr in a blog post here. Apparently people are getting sick of haggling over everything they buy and they’d gladly pay more for the convenience of being able to just walk into a store and get what they want when they want it. Who knew? Well, I did. My view of the world which has always been that no matter what price you set, people are always willing to pay more; and that, in fact, the higher price you set, the more desirable an object becomes.

The real clue that the whole online auction thing was bogus? As Carr points out in his article, back in 1999 a professor at the MIT Media Lab declared that fixed prices were a thing of the past and in the future auctions would rule everything. Rule Number One for anything tech-related: Whatever anyone from the MIT Media Lab says, the opposite is true.