John Battelle interviews ex-eBay research director Louis Monier, asking him why he’s leaving for Google.
“The main reason for me to leave is that eBay does not absorb innovation at the pace I enjoy, and its focus is narrower than Google. So rather than chewing on variations of e-commerce for the next few years, I’m very tempted to play with radically new stuff: satellites images, machine translation, ways to extract knowledge from giant bodies of data … who knows what else? And frankly, I’m dying to peek under the hood and see the infrastructure they have created. For someone like me, it’s the ultimate Christmas toy.”
