Word: ebay
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Omidyar says he tried to imbue eBay with a "founding culture" based on the moral principles he absorbed in childhood. "My mother always taught me to treat other people the way I want to be treated and to have respect for other people," he says. "Those are just good basic values to have in a crowded world." As it happened, there were also good business reasons to carry the Golden Rule into cyberspace. Unlike traditional e-tailers, who can control the consumer's experience, eBay is almost completely dependent on how users interact. "We really have to encourage our customers...
...person needs, and what one family needs and all of their future generations need is a tiny, tiny fraction of this total number," he says of his net worth. "That means we have an awesome responsibility to see that the wealth is put to good use." In addition to eBay's foundation, Omidyar and his wife are developing one of their own. He says he wants it to advance the same values as eBay: "Empowering people and helping them be the best they...
...friends in the flesh. But they're on her mind when she cruises clothing stores and comes upon a tantalizing markdown in designer duds. She buys by the armful, goes home to her computer and within a couple of days has set up her own fashion show--on eBay, in full view of anyone with a modem and a yen to bid on the clothes she puts up for auction. Bids race through cyberspace, winners are declared, and Wicker mails the goods to the lucky buyers--and cashes their money orders and cashier's checks, sometimes for a tidy profit...
...lots of company, among buyers and sellers alike. eBay makes a lot of people happy, and not just because it makes some people rich. The surprise--in more enthusiastic moments, you might even call it the miracle--of eBay is that it offers online consumers something rarer, more essential, more enduring than a chance to make a profit...
...Community" is an overworked term, too often applied artificially to any motley of people who share a skin color, an income level or a set of political bugaboos. But from the limitless ether of cyberspace, eBay has managed to conjure up the real thing. For many people, eBay does what communities have traditionally done. It not merely provides them financial sustenance but also draws them together with like-minded folk, offering encouragement, rewarding unique talents and interests, giving an outlet for their eccentricities and individuality and in some cases rescuing them from the margins where they would otherwise languish alone...