The New eBay headed in the Wrong Direction?

(MoneyWatch)  Incoming eBay CEO John Donahoe is taking the mega online auctioneer in the absolute wrong direction with his recent moves to "muffle" buyer ratings, raise fees on small sellers while offering discounts to power vendors, and emphasizing fixed-price products at eBay Express, says Harvard Online blogger John Sviokla.

What Donahoe apparently misses in all these changes is that eBay is not a retailer, but rather a social organism that created a way to find latent demand and link it up to sources of supply. To that end, he should not be focusing on new modes of retailing as a means of growth but pursuing new ways to discover even more nascent forms of demand and even more innovative supply methods.

In other words, eBay has lost its once intense focus on the customer.

Of course, eBay has suffered from slowing sales and loss of market share for a number of quarters, so Donahoe has a mandate for change, to use current political lexicon. (Current CEO Meg Whitman is stepping down at the end of March.) He has announced a number of initiatives to attract more buyers and sellers, such as a search capability to make it easier to find products and best prices on the site.

What do you think? Is Donahoe abandoning the power of social networking just at the moment it is taking off? Or is he on the right track in starting to fix some ingrained problems that are slowing eBay and costing it customers?