[CII] Advocatus Diaboli

[Felix 'FX' Lindner]

Hi,

On Tue, 1 Dec 2009 15:18:28 -0700 "Maher, Kevin" <kmaher at ebay.com>
wrote:
> As part of the thought experiment I'll self-servingly propose that
> both eBay and amazon would be unable to recover, as online-only
> e-commerce companies with no physical presence.  I work for eBay and
> will restrict my comments to what I know about our business, although
> I'm also a satisfied amazon customer (ssh).  I'm also excluding
> PayPal's business model as I think it warrants separate consideration.
> 
> I doubt any of these companies are considered "sufficiently
> important" or critical for anything other than themselves, but a
> statistic often quoted by eBay execs is that 750,000+ people use ebay
> for their primary or secondary source of income.  The site is
> important to them.  I do accept the fact that the world can live
> without eBay, and newspaper classified ads could make a big comeback.

That eBay quoted figure is a fairly interesting observation. Do you
think a break-down in cash flow for 750.000+ people could cause cascade
effects? 

By the way, I wasn't considering a permanent outage to the point where
classified ads in papers take over eBay's market share :)

> I'll assert that the creativity etc that goes into the neato
> packet-radio/POTS/BBS system that we put up as a replacement will fall
> significantly short of meeting the present needs of our buyers and
> sellers. It would be nothing remotely approaching what eBay is today,
> and would ultimately have less than 10% of our current transaction
> volume.  

That's one creative hack I was considering: Would eBay or similar shops
set up or rent large dial-up modem banks in order to be available?

> I'd be interested to hear whether gmail, yahoo, or others
> would be considered critical.

Alternatively, what use would gmail and yahoo have? How about all the
gmail users connecting directly (dial-up, GSM, etc) to Google's data
center and using gmail "internally"? It would be the only email
platform still functioning in such scenario.

cheers
FX

-- 
Recurity Labs GmbH           | Felix 'FX' Lindner 
http://www.recurity-labs.com | fx at recurity-labs.com 
Wrangelstrasse 4             | Fon: +49 30 69539993-0
10997 Berlin                 | PGP: A740 DE51 9891 19DF 0D05  
Germany                      |      13B3 1759 C388 C92D 6BBB
HRB 105213 B, Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, GF Felix Lindner