posted on June 10, 2001 02:37:59 PM
If there's no penalty for being stupid, why change?
They can hire idiots for practically nothing and make even more money by denying us our credits by lying about even being down in the first place.
Win-Win for EBAY
posted on June 10, 2001 03:31:41 PM
The problem is also with a stock market that values technically incompetent companies so highly. Until the market gets smart enough to publicly penalize a company for being technically stupid then this will continue to go on. Perhaps a company needs TWO things:
1) A great business plan that can be executed
2) The technical competence to execute the plan effectively
I can think of several examples of companies that have great business plans but could not attach a 10-baseT cable correctly if their life depended on it but as I value my freedom and family-life and a bank balance that is 100% free of the costs of my own legal defense, I will refrain from naming them!
posted on June 10, 2001 04:29:16 PM
victoria- if you email ebay and request that they refund your fees for items that ended during an outage, they will usually honor your request.
IMO they shouldn't make it so you have to ask though, they should just automatically refund.
posted on June 10, 2001 04:56:41 PM
Ebay is not valued highly in spite of their technical stupidity. They are valued highly because of how much business they do--how much money they make.
That's all that really counts.
The people who have the power to penalize Ebay are the buyers and the sellers.
Since they both will continue to do business on Ebay regardless of these problems, the problems will continue and Ebay will continue, for the most part, to ignore them.
Consider just a few of the requirements of this system. You have a database hosting billions of records - auctions, users, feedback, and more - all of which must be instantly queryable in only a few seconds, in thousands of ways, by millions of users concurrently. It must be text indexed and totally searchable, and continuously updated in realtime. It can never go down, but in case it does, it must keep redundant copies of itself, any of which must be hot-swappable at a moment's notice. And you must be able to survive the onslaught of bots such as vrane tools that are continuously hitting the site. And that barely scratches the surface.
The eBay application is one-of-a-kind, totally unique, never-before-attempted, and nothing to use as a model.
Speaking as a person who writes computer software for a living, I have great respect for the folks at eBay who have produced an amazing application. That it works at all, is rather amazing to begin with. That it continues to work with such a small failure rate is truly remarkable.
So please, don't be dissing eBay's technical folks as incompetent. Yes, the system crashes and we hate it. But it's not because they've got boobs in there, it's because they are pushing the limits of technology, and solving problems that have never been solved before. And software is never perfect the first time.
[ /soapbox ]
[minor reword]
[ edited by wbbell on Jun 10, 2001 08:48 PM ]
posted on June 10, 2001 08:41:42 PM
This "folk" said the managment won't pay attention to the techs. I have a feeling that the techs keep telling Meg "if we do this, it's gonna' crash", and Meg keeps telling them "do it anyway".
posted on June 10, 2001 09:47:04 PM
I think alot will agree, it is hard to feel much sympathy for a site that keeps instilling new rules and regulations and not willfully crediting down time... all the while changing the site every week, with more so called improvements.
One might come to the conclusion it would be better to fix something before adding more. Kind of like, shoe your horse before you ask him to grow another leg?
