Can eBay continue growing?

2. What are the problems that eBay is currently facing?

a. eBay is facing many problems in this growing market of e-commerce.
According to this case study its growth rates are slowing in the US and Germany its growth rates have slowed in the United States and Germany by increased seller fees, but they have been made up for in the French and Italian markets. EBay has been working hard to gain the Chinese market but it is slower to take off due to the other types of auctions already offered there.
b. eBay has also encountered trouble with the some specific target area markets such as real estate, travel, new-car sales, and expensive collectibles. They have recently launched a new VoIP technology that is aimed to increase the communication barrier between the buyers and sellers. The one problem is that many sellers are not interested in adding this option to their pages.
c. Compliance is also a major issue because of the various laws and regulations when it comes to e-commerce. Ultimately eBay may be liable for its members, when they sell false goods or leave negative feedback to other consumers and customers.
d. By far honesty is eBay’s main challenge. Are sellers being truthful about there items? In my opinion they don’t do a very good job in this area. I have a friend that purchased a high end item from eBay and she paid a pretty cost only to discover upon arrival that it was a replica and that the seller had not been honest. When she contacted eBay they took the sellers side. Also identity fraud and theft have been a major issue.
e. eBay’s main issue is keeping its customers and sellers happy. I don’t believe they have thoroughly tackled this effort.

5. Will eBay be successful in the long run? Why or why not?

Maybe, I think eBay will stay successful as long as another e-commerce site doesn’t start up that offers better security and seller/buyer service.
eBay needs to focus more on monitoring their security and also their sellers merchandise. They need to offer better customer service or eventually the negative word of mouth might catch up to them. I know many people that will NOT shop on ebay, due to horror stories from other friends.
They do have a good advantage due to their recent partnerships with Wiki and MyCollectibles. They will be able to move in on the niche markets associated with the wiki’s and also with people that have a passion for collectibles. As long as people are too lazy to go out and shop for what they need eBay will continue to flourish.

MIT researcher and artist finds inner beauty in computer viruses

Dragulescu is a Romanian-born MIT researcher that also has another talent. He is also an artist and when he was asked to put an image to some common viruses by a computer security company, he came up with beautiful works of art. As he began doing research he found unusual reoccurring patterns which he was able to turn into art. Dragulescu has peeled back the code behind the world's worst tech bugs and rendered stunning images from it.

He used the data to coax pointy green tentacles from the dreaded e-mail worm "Mydoom" and grew pretty peach petals from the epicenter of the spam file "Degreediploma5."


"These types of threats are very smart. Very intelligent in design. Digital organisms, really, that adapt themselves and replicate. We wanted to capture some of that complexity and uniqueness."

He built an algorithm based computer system where he entered his repeat findings in code. These codes were then converted into different types of tentacles and many beautiful colors.

I found this atricle very interesting how he was able to put beauty to such herendous computer viruses. It's also interesting to see the similarities between computer virus "stucture" and human virus stucture, they are very similar. Amazing how such a beautiful and tiny system can infect and destroy so much life!

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/358868_wormart14.html

2.) What are Google’s sources of competitive advantage? How does it provide value to it’s users?

Google's IT infrastructure is one of its main competitive advantages it has an estimated 450,000 servers in over 25 locations world wide. They also have a very flexible infrastructure that allows for the speed to stay high. Google also evaluates a page link system and a web crawler. They also implement MapReduce which is a programming model to simplify processing and creating large data sets. They also have WorkQueue, this groups queries and schedules them for distributes processing. These technologies provide value for the customer by creating a fast and efficient search engine.

5.)How successful do you think Google will be in the future?

I think that Google will stay strong for along time as long as they keep up there diligence with respect to their programming processes and they keep their IT infrastructure secret secure. There is a good possibility that a new SE will come along but it will take years to get up to speed with Google so the competitor will most likely always be behind. Google also has brand association and an emotional attachment by it's users, which will be hard for any competition to gain leverage on. I am an avid Google user and have been using it for years, Ive tried new SE's over the years but i have always gone back to Google because it is clearly the best.

Case study chapter 5

3.) Evaluate Merill Lynch's approach to Web services development. What are the advantages and disadvantages? Is it a good solution? Explain your answer.

Mr Crew seemed to have a clear undersatnding of what type of system the organization needed, he realized that there was not going to be a quick or cheap way to meet his goal. After looking into buying a premade system that would do the job he realized that it would not be worth it due to the amount of money it would cost to retrain all of there associates, it was estimated that it would have taken more than 1 year and over $80 million dollars, which was not feasable. So he decided that tehy would build a system from the ground up. This solution came with a list of issues as well when you copy data and move it from place to place many errors can occur and data can be lost. They ended up creating a new set of in-house proprietory tools that enabled there system to communicate with eachother cross functionally. I think that this was the right choice for Merill Lynch, when you have such a large organization to switch over a whole new system is usally very difficult. Since they had the man power and the knowledge to build there own system, I think it was a smart choice.


4.) Do you think that Merrill Lynch's decision to sell of its successful technology initiatives was a good idea? Why or Why not?

I think that it was a wise decision. They placed alot of money and manhours into building this new system, marketing it and making a profit seems like a a no brainer. They not only have the proof that the system is capable of providing support to a large order of buisness, but they also have it brand marked by their name. They have already used the system to gain thier competeive edge, and since they are the pioneers of the system they would be able to tweak it to there own advantage. Consumers may be able to purchase the program but Merill Lynch ultimately owns the programmer which is much more valuable.

The Mask of the Future?

Michael Kanellos Intel readies massive multicore processors;Staff Writer, CNET News.com Published: June 14, 2007 4:00 AM PDT

In chapter 5 there is a topic called Multicore processors, which is any system that contains two or more processors. This new way of increasing speed became very popular because the old way often generated an over abundance of heat on the system causing internal damage to the unit.

In 2007 Intel launched it's new prototype containg an 80 core processor that has a so called exoskeletal component. These new chips would have a better functionality and would be easier to integrate into new systems. Although this technology is extremely tempting, there has been alot of skepticism around this new prototype. Some of the more common questions were will this system run existing software and also is the amount of heat produced tolerable, Intels answer was "yes". This new terascale technology can aid in so called "hotspots", these are cores on the system that work nonstop and become overheated. This new system does kind of a hop scotch around the different cores so no one is working harder than the other. Intel is still working out the kinks of this new system before it can be offered mainstream.

Individual assignment for week#3 04/13/08

This article discusses how an analyst did a test simulation of an information system in a powder coating company production line. Through this test they hoped to gain knowledge of the major and minor org and prod issues. Through the use of this system the company would be able to better serve there customers and improve there lead time. This will give them a competitive advantage over their rivals.
We learned in chapter 2 that IS can help company's gain competitive advantage, and this is exactly the situation in the above case. They were able to ID issues in there production line and help increase the supply of the products. They found bottlenecks in there production line which were able to be corrected for, but without the IS the company would have had a very hard time determining these issues because they were in multiples. Many times we as humans can diagnose one or more concurrent problems but when you get into a area that is a grey it is sometimes very hard to grasp what is really going wrong in an organization. Information systems are a great way to diagnose, implement and improve business processes.




A. Azadeh, M. Haghnevis, Y. Khodadadegan Design of the integrated information system, business, and production process by simulation;volume 59, Issue 2 , Pages 216 - 234
Published Online: 6 Nov 2007
Copyright © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., A Wiley Company

Case Chapter 4

1.) I believe that these issues do pose an ethical issue. We deserve to know what we should and shouldn't say on the telephone. I think that tapping just any one's telephone is an invasion of privacy.

4.) The phone company's responsiblity is to provide information in there privacy policy letting it's users know that there privacy may be breeched, if they fit the profiling lisited by the NSA. Ethical, social and political issues can apply to the profiling of it's customers based on name, race, gender, and calling radius. I think the question of how much are the phone companies being paid by the gov to realease the information would also bring up issues of ethicacy. What is the price that has been put on our privacy, i think we deserve to know.

5.) I suppose that this is an OK compromise, at least there are a set of limitations and a few hoops that need to be jumped through. I suppose that if they have reasonable suspicion that it should be allowed.