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Comment by robryan | Hacker News Reader

I really like what Rakuten is doing, they are leveraging the profits that the Rakuten marketplace in Japan brings in the acquire what I would term as second tier marketplaces around the world.

Buy.com in the US appears to be slowly being overhauled and Play.com in the UK is aggressively expanding out into new categories for 2 examples.

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Didn't they end up destroying the name recognition buy.com had in the US? Had they kept the name the same and put more money into the business it would have made sense. I don't understand their business.

They say that the CEO of Rakuten is a really weird and eccentric person. A few years ago he instated a company wide policy that all staff must use English for any and all business within the company. Since most Japanese people can't speak English, he ended up creating a really weird atmosphere where people pretend to use English but really end up secretly (or not so much) conducting business in Japanese.

In short, he's a weirdo, though a successful one.

My wife works for one of their companies here in the US, and yes, they do all meetings in English, which really doesn't affect their US companies,but does make company wide meetings quite odd, painful at points.

I think play.com will be quite a powerful player over time, but I do miss the days where they just focused on selling media at a very, very good price. Shame the regulations caught up eventually.

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