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

To: Bill Harmond who wrote (5765)	10/6/1999 10:37:00 PM
From: Randy Ellingson	Respond to of 7772

Randy, Did you listen to the Yahoo call? TK said they're planning to charge for auctions down the road. Not yet, but I certainly will. I've been home sick the past couple days, and just started feeling better today. I wanted to catch the Harvard College interview with the governor of my original home state -- fairly amusing, and his answers are rarely boring. The "free now, fee later" has been a common conjecture on the future of many "too good to be true" free e-services. If Yahoo manages to build the biggest audience and can qualify as the best place to buy and sell, they can surely find a way to charge a little for what they do. Yahoo is quite a company, and I have to snicker when I hear people say that Yahoo has "virtually no earnings". There won't be too many more quarters they'll be able to say that straight-faced. Randy

To: Bill Harmond who wrote (5765)	10/7/1999 11:19:00 AM
From: Randy Ellingson	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 7772

Sold my EBAY holdings (IRA). My concern is that the auction space will naturally fragment into categories. E.g., although EBAY may always own certain categories (say, baseball cards), other sites which successfully ramp up auctions to critical mass in another category will effectively steal revenue/profit from eBay. I may be wrong and/or early with this concern, but I can always change my mind about this later. As for the pre-holiday buying frenzy I'm passing on, nothing is a given and I try to stay true to "there's no time like the present" for my selling and buying (once I've reached a conclusion). FWIW, I bought eBay in February so this was not a long term holding. And I do use their service on occasion. Randy