eBay to Drop Passport, .NET Support
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BetaNews is reporting that the auction site will be dropping Microsoft&#39;s .NET support somtime in January 2005. &quot;Auction site eBay announced to members on its Web site Wednesday afternoon that it will drop
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(InfoWorld) - A massive computing grid helps eBayÂ make changes to its auction Web site on the fly while maintaining a 99.94 percent up time, said Paul Strong, a distinguished research scientist there. While eBay designed most of its grid infrastructure, the company also wants to participate in standards-setting communities to bring more improvements to computer grid technology, Strong said Tuesday during the GridWorld conference in Washington, D.C. EBay's core business is hosting Web-based auctions, not in creating new grid technologies, he said. "We don't see ourselves as an IT development shop for development tools," he said. By working together on grid standards, participants can help "transitions be less painful," he added. On Monday, the Open Grid Forum standards body officially opened for business, delivering on its commitment made in June to detail its goals during GridWorld. EBay has made great strides in its back-end technology since the late '90s, but the company still wants more improvements, including the ability to change the site's code nearly instantaneously, Strong said. Right now, the company, with more than 15,000 servers in its production environment, distributes new application code to its Web site every two weeks, he said. EBay developers write about 100,000 lines of code each week, and using a traditional grid made up of about 350 Windows, Linux and Solaris computers, the site takes about 20 minutes to update with the new features, Strong said. With 104 million items listed for auction on eBay every day, the company needs to keep the site running while those changes are happening, he added. "We can't afford to take the site down," he said. "It's like changing the engines on a jumbo jet mid-flight." About $1,608 worth of merchandise sells on eBay every second, and a vehicle sells every two minutes on average, Strong said. A trading card sells every six seconds, and a pound of the Korean food kimchi sells every minute. The site has seen huge growth since the late '90s, he noted. Ebay.com has gone from 54 million page views a day in June 1999 to 874 million in December 2005, Strong said. The site sent out 35 million e-mail messages a day in December, compared to 1 million a day in June '99. And the site's up time went from about 97 percent to 99.94 percent in that time period. Still, the company would like more grid functionality, Strong said. EBay would like to get closer to that mythical 99.999 percent up time, he said. "We break almost anything we use," he said. "We're pretty much at the extreme limit of what you can do with off-the-shelf technology." And eBay doesn't want to wait to update the site every two weeks, he added. "We want to be faster; we want to be more agile," he said. "If someone comes up with a cool change that's not that big, I'd like to be able to roll it tomorrow." Improvements in grid computing is where community standards can help, he said. "We believe everyone has something to contribute," he said to the GridWorld audience. "We'd like to share ... with the community." GridWorld is organized by IDG, the parent company of IDG News Service.
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A pro-business think tank in Europe has recommended unbundling Microsoft Corp.&#39;s Windows operating system from sales of new PCs in order to give customers more choice when buying a new computer.
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Another Online auction site eBay announced Wednesday that it will soon drop support for Microsoft&#39;s Passport for log-in to the site and discontinuing alerts sent via Microsoft&#39;s .
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EBay says it is ending its ad pullout from Google's U.S. AdWords network.
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Online auction giant eBay Inc. will stop letting members sign in to its site using Microsoft Corp.&#39;s Passport service, another sign of the scaling back of the Redmond company&#39;s once-sweeping vision for its user authentication system.
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Microsoft is recasting ambitions for its .Net Passport identification system, saying the service now will be limited to its own online offerings and those of close partners. Microsoft no longer sees Passport as a single sign-on system for the Web at large, a spokeswoman said.
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eBay is reportedly pulling out of the Chinese market, instead opting to replace it with a new site that would be run by Bejing-based Tom Online, the Wall Street Journal reports. So far, the auction site has refused to confirm the speculation.
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Online auction giant eBay has been slow to respond to concerns about pirated software being sold there, prompting the Software &amp; Information Industry Association (SIIA)&#160;to file nine lawsuits against eBay-based software sellers, an SIIA official said.The SIIA believes it is necessary to file the lawsuits because eBay has been largely uncooperative in cracking down on software piracy, said Keith Kupferschmid, senior vice president of the trade group&#39;s antipiracy division.&quot;We haven&#39;t had very much success in getting [eBay] to work with us,&quot; he said.SIIA has asked eBay to stop &quot;buy it now&quot; and one-day auctions for software, but eBay has not complied, Kupferschmid said. In many cases, sellers offering pirated software are looking to sell it quickly, he said. SIIA also asked eBay if the trade group could buy banner advertisements warning about piracy when a user is looking at software, but the auction site declined, Kupferschmid added. &quot;We shouldn&#39;t have to do that,&quot; he said. &quot;eBay should do that themselves.&quot;Two eBay spokespeople didn&#39;t immediately respond to a request for comments on SIIA&#39;s position.The lawsuits, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, are the largest round the SIIA has filed since launching its auction-site antipiracy program two years ago, the trade group said in a news release. Seven of the lawsuits were filed Wednesday, the SIIA said. Two others were filed two weeks ago. Most of the lawsuits target eBay sellers of Abobe PhotoShop CS3; one of the lawsuits targets a seller of several Symantec software packages.The defendants are from Texas, California, Washington state, Illinois, and New Jersey.&quot;SIIA has declared war against those who continue to sell pirated software on auction sites such as eBay,&quot; Kupferschmid said. &quot;Our goal is to give illegal software sellers a rude awakening so that unsuspecting software buyers and legitimate sellers are protected. For too long, auction sellers have been able to sell pirated software while risking only the removal of their auction.&quot;Since launching its Auction Litigation Program about two years ago, SIIA has filed about 20 lawsuits, not including the nine from the last two weeks, Kupferschmid said. The SIIA has won about six of those lawsuits in court, but in every case, the lawsuits have resulted in the seller stopping unauthorized sales of software, he said.&quot;Ultimately, they have stopped selling the illegal software, and that&#39;s what we&#39;re trying to do here,&quot; he said.
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EBay&#39;s online payment service PayPal has suffered intermittent glitches since late last week, locking some users out of their accounts for long stretches and making
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A brand new year and already so much to purge. It is time for eBay, that all-season national yard sale. But who wants to put up with the annoyances of holding an eBay auction?
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(InfoWorld) - When Sandy Scarce began selling apparel on eBay three years ago, she planned to use the company's marketplace as her only sales channel, but today, deeply discouraged, she is moving away from it. Upset at what she perceives as misdirected policies and clunky services from eBay, Scarce opened up her own online storeÂ this week. She's also moving inventory to a rival marketplace from Amazon.com, whose operation and sales climate she finds superior. "I'm transitioning away from eBay," said Scarce, ranked as an eBay Silver PowerSeller, which means her Sandy's Closet eBay store generates between $3,000 and $9,999 in average monthly sales and provides a high level of service. Among her chief complaints is an effort announced by eBay in July of last year to prioritize its core auction listings over its stores' inventory, which she said has hurt her sales. "If you're not an eBay auction seller, eBay doesn't want you on their site. eBay has disadvantaged store owners over the last year to drive them away," Scarce said. To boost traditional listings, eBay began marketing them more aggressively, increased their exposure on the eBay Express specialty site, and raised store listing fees. "As an eBay store owner, this hasn't been a good development for me," Scarce said. "They're hiding store owners and their merchandise, making it harder for buyers to find them." She is also disappointed with the tools and applications eBay provides to sellers, many of which she considers clunky, and with the performance of the site, which she finds has deteriorated in terms of response times and availability. Scarce is not alone. On Thursday, as eBay kicked off its annual eBay Live conference for merchants in Boston, the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA) posted a scathing paper on its Web site, blasting eBay for what the group considers a significant deterioration of the marketplace. "The eBay marketplace has continued to degrade, and the current state is unhealthy," reads the paper. In the document, PESA, which includes many large eBay merchants, says the buyer experience on eBay leaves a lot to be desired and blames eBay for failing to address this issue and make the necessary investments to fix the problems. PESA is concerned that the eBay marketplace will fall into "a permanent decline." PESA considers as major problems eBay's search functionality, which it rates as subpar, and a lack of incentives for merchants that provide superior service. PESA also faults eBay for failing to fully leverage for the marketplace companies it has acquired, such as Skype and Shopping.com. In eBay's defense, eBay spokesman Hani Durzy said the company is in the midst of a "multiquarter" effort to improve the buyer experience on the marketplace. For example, eBay is actively laboring to improve its search capabilities with an effort it calls Finding 2.0. Some of those enhancements are already being tested with small groups of buyers and will be rolled out to all users progressively this year, he said. With Finding 2.0, eBay wants to improve the relevance of search results without sacrificing what Durzy calls "serendipity," which eBay considers a key ingredient of the eBay experience: Stumbling upon a product that happily surprises you. Another part of the buyer experience improvement effort is the continued reduction of fraud on the marketplace, in order to increase trust and safety. "We've always been good at this," he said. But as online crime becomes more sophisticated, eBay is stepping up its efforts, becoming more proactive in areas like detection of counterfeit products, he said. Regarding the gripes of store owners like Scarce, Durzy said that eBay in no way wants to get rid of those merchants. Instead, it just wants to "reignite" eBay's core auction activity, he said. Back in July, eBay officials explained that store listings take longer to sell and are more costly for eBay to host compared with traditional listings. Thus the reasoning behind the measures it has implemented to better balance auction and store listings. Still, the strategy makes little sense for those high-volume merchants that are distancing themselves from eBay. Designer Athletic generated about 80 percent of its sales from its eBay store a year ago, and today that is heading toward 50 percent, said George Trantas, president of the footwear and apparel vendor. "Our goal is to grow our off-eBay business," Trantas said. "eBay conversions aren't as great as they have been in the past." In addition to selling on eBay, where it is a PowerSeller, the company sells from its own Web site and from the Amazon Marketplace and others like it. Like Scarce, Trantas has found that the traditional eBay buyer requires a lot more customer service attention before a sale is closed when compared with sellers on the Amazon Marketplace and other venues. That adds to the cost of doing business on eBay, he said. Both Trantas and Scarce attribute the difference in buyers to the fact that customers generally feel safer on Amazon than on eBay, so they require less assurances from the seller. Adding to merchant concerns is the decision by eBay this week toÂ turn off all of its paid search ads on Google's U.S. ad network. One of the worried ones is Jonathan Garriss, PESA's executive director and CEO of Gotham City Online, an apparel store on eBay that also has its own site. "This is very concerning for me as a seller that eBay is willing to shut off a lot of traffic to its sellers and listings. This doesn't necessarily hurt eBay, which still collects its fees, but rather the merchants on its site," Garriss said, adding that eBay should reinstate these ads immediately. A source told IDG News Service on Wednesday that the decision was made to punish Google for planning to throw aÂ now-canceled party in BostonÂ for eBay Live attendees that want eBay to allow them to offer the Google Checkout online payment system to their buyers. Durzy said that the ad pullout remains in place as of Thursday afternoon. "I very much hope they work it out. Google and eBay have a lot to offer each other," said David Yaskulka, vice president of product marketing at Kompolt, an online auction agency. eBay says Google Checkout is too new, while Google says eBay is just trying to protect its own PayPal online payments system. Garriss, who is evaluating Checkout for his own site, believes eBay should reconsider its position. "Google has proven there's room for improvement on the online payment side, and if another option makes shoppers more comfortable, as a merchant, I'd like to add that option," Garriss said. Scarce, meanwhile, decided to stay home and not attend eBay Live. Today, her eBay inventory is down to half of what it was a year ago. After only six months, Amazon Marketplace already generates 25 percent of her sales. She'll maintain a minimal presence on eBay to drive traffic to her own store. "I see no reason to go to eBay Live. The events of this past year have made it painfully obvious that eBay isn't interested in what I do."
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Microsoft&#39;s Passport authentication technology lost a prominent partner this week when eBay announced that it would stop supporting customer logins through Microsoft&#39;s Passport and .
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eBay has announced that its users no longer will be able to sign in to its Web sites using Passort, Microsoft&#39;s identity-management technology.
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DECEMBER 06, 2004  - Microsoft Corp. will offer custom support options on a flat-fee basis to users of Windows NT 4.0 Server and Exchange Server 5.5 when the standard support phases for those products end.
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NetSuite has updated the e-commerce piece of its NetSuite hosted application suite, allowing users to manage sales efforts on eBay Inc.'s action site
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Starting late January 2005 eBay will no longer support Microsoft&#39;s Passport and .NET Alerts. The Microsoft Passport button that is currently displayed on Sign In pages will be replaced with links to a page