Word: auction
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Forget about black monoliths. If the late great Stanley Kubrick had known what was going to be really cool by the year 2001, his seminal movie would have opened with 25 million ape-descendants clustered silently round an awe-inspiring and somewhat unreal auction house. Then to the tune of the Blue Danube, some bizarrely diverse items would shoot weightlessly through the ether - sterling silver Jaguar cars, Sherlock Holmes first editions, Xerox networked printers, a pair of Madonna concert tickets, an ostrich-egg incubator - moving at a rate of 5 million purchases per day. The climactic scene, perhaps, would feature...
...unreal auction house in question is, of course, eBay, which is in many ways the most powerful pure-play Internet force on planet Earth in 2001. It has recently become the top e-commerce destination, growing at a rate of roughly 1 million users per month. While its brethren in the legendary website club (namely Yahoo! and Amazon.com) suffer alarming slowdowns in growth, eBay posts quarter after quarter of stunning profits (its latest: $21 million, an increase of more than 150% on the same period last year...
...seller. Price is determined by the number of buyers and how much they're willing to pay. Haggling is not only mandatory, it's automated. Sales have a deadline; everything must go. And most importantly the quality of the bazaar increases exponentially with its size. There are rival online auction services - Yahoo! and Amazon.com again - but eBay still has the lion's share of the market, about 85%. Put simply, it maintains the lead because it has the lead. If you're a seller, there's nowhere better...
...complex laws of economics, eBay spreads like a virus. There are few geographic restrictions: Australian, Austrian, British, Canadian, French, German, Irish, Italian, Japanese, New Zealand and Swiss versions of the website are available. There are practically no legal restrictions, especially since a San Francisco court recently declared the auction service could not be held responsible for pirated or bootlegged music sold on its site (Napster should be so lucky). Its name has entered the global lexicon: "I bet you'll find that on eBay" has become the punch line to a thousand jokes. For the media, eBay is a bottomless...
Which helps explain why corporations from IBM to General Motors are falling over themselves to do deals with the Web auction giant. Disney auctioned off the "D" from the original Disneyland sign. Technology titan Sun Microsystems sold server hardware on the site with million-dollar starting prices. Yet despite such big-league partnerships, it's still the little guy that counts. Unlike your local mall, eBay would not survive for a second without mom and pop operations. Its entire success is predicated on extreme diversity. And you can forget about the pernicious influence of Madison Avenue. In this hypermodern arena...