Lars Hinrich Stepping Down At Xing, Stefan Gross-Selbeck To Lead Xing

Lars Hinrich, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Some of you may recall my ‘experiential marketing’ project with Xing a few years ago, where i tried — week after week, for two months — to use Xing as a social networking tool. I was stymied by both the bureaucratic mindset of the company and the poor design of the site. Check out a few of my posts about the experience, which started before OpenBC changed its name to Xing (search page here).

At the time, it seemed to be a very German-oriented experience, and to some extent, the project I was involved in was intended to get more awareness in the US market, but when 90% of the user base is in Europe, and many were communicating in other languages, it was a hard hard sell, considering the notion is business networking.

All of that is a fitting prelude to the news that Lars Hinrich is stepping down as CEO, and that he will be replaced by Stefan Gross-Selbeck, now head of eBay Germany.

I wonder if Gross-Selbeck’s appointment means that they are finally going to wake up to what is happening outside Germany, or will they take a defensive approach, and try to hold onto Germany from depredations by others, specifically Linkedin? Perhaps it is step one in a plan to sell the company?