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Technology Stocks : eBay - Superb Internet Business Model -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J. C. Dithers who wrote (3968)	6/30/1999 10:16:00 PM
From: Robert Rose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7772

<Who really cares about these minute-to-minute reports on eBay outages?> Folks who are short the stock and posting this stuff to spread FUD. Disclaimer: Neither short nor long ebay at present.

To: J. C. Dithers who wrote (3968)	6/30/1999 10:19:00 PM
From: Eric Wells	Respond to of 7772

This is the second time in three weeks that Ebay's site has been down during peak business hours. You will recall the time on June 10 that the site was down for over 24 hours (and the subsequent dive in the stock). Luckily, this time, it was only 90 minutes. However, during those 90 minutes, a lot of business was lost - not only for Ebay, but for sellers that had listed items for auction. I discovered today's outage because I had gone to Ebay specifically to bid on an auction that closed at 5:15 Pacific Time today - however, I was unable to bid because the site was down. The seller of the item had to sell that particular item at a price lower than what might have been obtained had I had an opportunity to bid. Now multiply this experience by hundreds or thousands and you have a lot of angry sellers and angry potential buyers due to today's outage. E-commerce sites cannot go down - it reveals them to be technically incompetent and it opens the door to competitors. While if Amazon goes down, you can indeed come back at a later time to buy a book - however, if Ebay goes down, the auctions that are scheduled to close during the time of outage are over forever - if you wanted to bid on one of these auctions, you're out of luck. You would think that after the fiasco on June 10 that Ebay's CEO would have done everything possible to prevent any future outages. And here we are three weeks later and the site goes down for 90 minutes today during peak hours. This is unacceptable for customers - and this is unacceptable for investors. Ebay is proving that they don't have the technical knowledge to run an auction site - and this just builds a better case for competing auction sites such as Amazon and Yahoo. Is keeping your web site up and running important to an e-commerce company? I believe it is very important. And if Ebay doesn't have the technical knowledge to keep it's site up - all the time - we have to ask why their company is valued at $19 billion? Ebay stock should decline tomorrow - if nothing more to send a message to Ebay management that such outages are unacceptable. I have no position in Ebay - I'm neither long nor short. I was going to buy the stock tomorrow - but not now. -Eric Wells