An Inside Look At eBay's Technology 84
endychavez writes with a CIO Insight profile giving a look inside eBay and its technology platform. The company has 40,000 outside developers working to increase its value and efficiency. From the article: "'They are way ahead of other companies' in terms of supporting developers, says one application builder... 'This a new wave of business,' says [another developer's marketing director]. 'eBay is a supplier, a marketing channel and a competitor. It's a weird arrangement.' ... 'If you can't split it, you can't scale it,' says Eric Billingsley, head of eBay Research Labs. 'We've made ourselves masters of virtualization.' ... eBay is able to publish a new version of its site every two weeks, adding 100,000 lines of code, all while in use."
100'000 lines of code every fortnight? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would eBay need to add that quantity of code every fortnight? It doesn't strike me as an indicator of very efficient programming.
A new site every 2 weeks? (Score:2, Insightful)
Can someone tell me why this is viewed as a good thing?
Fourty THOUSAND Developers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Want to improve eBay's efficiency? Ditch 39,500 of those developers.
Or by developers do they mean "people who have downloaded the API docs"?
in other ebay news (Score:5, Insightful)
Poor priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad... (Score:3, Insightful)
Too bad they didn't support the people who buy merchandise through the site that well.
Do you even know what a "natural monopoly" is? (Score:4, Insightful)
eBay is a natural monopoly because a dominant online auction has a self-reinforcing properties. It's not simple for a buyer to switch to another auction site, because it will not have many listings, so they won't find what they want to buy. And it's not simple for a seller to switch to another site, because no one goes there to buy things (because there are no sellers), so you don't sell anything.
It's a huge catch-22 situation. These kinds of monopolies usually take drastic change to break - some huge event that will cause a critical mass of buyers and sellers to move to another site. As long as eBays price increases stay small and incremental, it is unlikely this will occur.
Mis-Labelled (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fourty THOUSAND Developers? (Score:4, Insightful)
They're outside developers, so I'm pretty sure thats what they mean.