However, I do think there has to be a slot for innovation and incorporating ideas into the main site. And most importantly, the way you measure impact has to change.

For example, allowing the community to blog – would it have increased revenues? No. Would it have cost money? Yes. Would it have increased the feeling of community? Yes. Would it have improved eBay’s presence in natural search? Absolutely.

However, an idea that was proposed in 2003 has yet to happen. To me, that’s a shame. It wasn’t implemented because compared to US Core revenues or a new feature, it is less than a drop in the bucket. But then, you are not valuing customer loyalty and stickiness and all those things that actually do have value. Large companies have to find a way to measure these things.

Btw, I like your product posts a lot – nice job! :)

[PS: Can you get the “subscribe to comments” plugin? That way if there is a followup, the commenters will get an email – http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/2004/06/03/wp-subscribe-to-comments/

There could be two ways to justify the UI improvements
- Include it as 30% of maintenance/engineering/baseline changes necessary to sustain the product over a 5-year plan.
- Measure the UI improvements in terms of lowered costs to support, lowered costs to maintain documentation, lowered costs to escalations etc.

The latter is hard to do and quantify.