by Nick Patience
eBay Inc chief executive Meg Whitman re-emerged into the public glare yesterday, some two weeks after the company suffered its biggest challenge yet to its phenomenal growth in the form of a 22-hour outage on June 11. After that, some had criticized the company’s handling of the crisis – eBay boasts that many depend on its service for their livelihood, so crisis is not overstating it – as Whitman declined to talk about the problem publicly. She chose to come out in the techie-laden atmosphere of INet 99, the Internet Society’s annual gathering, which this year is being held in San Jose, California. However, she didn’t explain exactly what happened at the company, although she didn’t sidestep the subject entirely, having it as the last point on a slide listing the obstacles the company has faced since going public in September last year. These included the restriction of the sale of firearms in February, competition from Yahoo! Inc and Amazon.com Inc, which launched their auction services during eBay’s two stock offering periods, plus the whole issue of trust between buyers and sellers who don’t know each other; a problem the company has addressed with insurance and the use of escrow for big ticket items.
Whitman told the audience the company dedicated 50 engineers to the outage problem and called its top 10,000 or so users personally to apologize. It also extended the length of auctions affected by 48 hours, provided refunds and, as has been publicly disclosed already, the whole thing knocked about $3m to $5m off its top line for this quarter.
She says the company’s focus going forward will be site stability and scalability and having fewer priorities, but handling them better. She says the company’s systems are Y2K-compliant, as they should be for a company that’s only just over three years old. But, she warns, it is dependent on its suppliers and, to that end, it will replace the version of Oracle it is running with one that is Y2K-ready within the next two months. She says the main obstacle to eBay’s growth is that perennial Silicon Valley problem, finding the right people.
