posted on June 15, 2002 07:04:35 PM
A new book about eBay reveals that the story of it starting as a service to trade Pex dispensers was just a PR story. Here's a link to the San Jose Mercury News story:
posted on June 16, 2002 09:41:17 AM
The story more or less of how ebay started isn't false, it's pretty much true .
What is false is how the media painted the Story, ebay has always been about an easyer way to find collectors of like Items from pez to what ever.
The key was never about romance it was the development of a better more cost effective way to collect trade and bring these people togeather in one place to do it.
When they frist started putting togeather the Idea that has became the Ebay of today the web was new and the working knowlege of the few scripting methods ways to give read and write access were fairly new and a risky thing.
These people got there knowlege and help puttingthis site togeather by gathering on usenet and IRC bits and pieces came from many places to make the frist software work mainly hackers and open source mainly they worked side by side with the same group who were developing that little known operating system that turned out to be called linux ..
What started out as a better modern way to improve a hobby of collecting at first turned then turnedinto a programing hobby over time as word spread this thing went crazy others wanted to use this site and programing for there tradeing and collecting.
Believe it or not at frist the programing was made open source and they were offering it to other to use on there websites but just like today the it took a little effort and shareing it open source as long as others made there improvment source code avalable didn't go work to well just like to days user attitude if if requires some effort or money they want little to nothing to do with it.
so the orginal site over time was opened to other uses through registration as more and more registered the site had to move from it's free site Roots to dedicated servers and a fee policy was setup as ebay moved from hacker hobby sigle group looking for a better way to trade and sell and became business they didn't know how to deal with this and the rest is history.
it all started as an idea for a personel website for collecting hobby and was turned into the "gold rush" of the late 90s.
by 2000 there were so many sites and people looking to get in on this and finding its wasnt easy money but real work to make it work 24/7 that the thrill was gone as well many of the old real world scammers had started finding this and the fronteer was become over crowded.
even though the ramance of the ebay story was cooked up it didn't take much imagination to make the jump.
people should stop trying to debunk something that can't be debunked auctionweb was built because of an earily interest in what the world wide web could be and is becoming today.
