Monier: Google absorbs innovation quickly, eBay does not

We mentioned earlier Alta Vista founder Louis Monier’s decision to head to Google, leaving his job at eBay.

Monier gives an interesting interview here with John Battelle, in which he says “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…”

The other thing that caught our attention was the carte-blanche nature of Google’s offer:

“All it took was one email to [Google co-founder] Larry,” Monier explains of how he got the offer. And regarding the job mandate: “The agenda is ‘Whatever I want.'”

Meanwhile, we’ve been on the eBay trail, and wrote this story (or here) for the Mercury News today, about how eBay is doing all it can do to keep its customers — even helping them build their own Web sites off the eBay platform. Google’s market share in search, meanwhile, continues to grow.