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

To: Randy Ellingson who wrote (6198)	11/28/1999 6:03:00 AM
From: KeepItSimple	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7772

>Is eBay undergoing normally scheduled maintenance? Does Yahoo go down every week for 5 hours of scheduled maintenance? Does Amazon? Does any other major web company? No. Does ANYONE else in the industry regularly shut down their system every week? You want to know why Ebay has to go down every week? Because their entire software and database is a hacked together piece of non-scalable crap that is almost entirely unchanged since the early days when their inventory consisted of 5 thousand pez dispensors. They've never updated it. They cant- the downtime would be devestating to their stock price. So every week they need to rebuild their database, add a little more duct tape and bailing wire, and pray the system lasts just a few more months so the insiders can dump a few hundred million dollars more of EBAY stock. And they can't afford to hire dozens of programmers to write a new database and server front/backend because if they actually paid anyone a salary, they wouldn't be able to make 1 cent a share in "profit" anymore. They would show a loss. And their stock would be destroyed. So in short, they are never going to update the system. The users have shown they are perfectly willing to put up with crappy service, deadbeat & shill bidders, rampant fraud, and anything else. Why change when the stock keeps going up? Everything else is meaningless. There isnt a single employee or founder at Ebay that takes a cut from operating profit. Not one. The only way for an Ebay insider to make a profit is to sell stock. Why would any sane insider focus on profitability when the REAL money is made from pumping the stock?