Word: gripes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...employee, Omidyar soon found himself thrust into a new and unwanted role: grievance officer. Buyers and sellers with complaints about each other were e-mailing him personally and asking him to step in. Omidyar urged them to work things out amicably between themselves. But if eBayers really had to gripe, he decided, they should do it publicly on the site. "I wanted to reinforce the notion that if you're going to bring a complaint about someone, do it out in the open," says Omidyar. "You can't come running to Daddy." He had one other proviso: if traders...
...with a Founder's Letter in February 1996 in which he laid out a philosophy that still guides eBay: that people are basically good, that they make mistakes, and that they should be given the benefit of the doubt. "I was afraid it would turn into just a gripe forum, but as I watched it develop, I was amazed to realize that people enjoy giving praise." In fact the feedback eBayers posted about one another was overwhelmingly positive...
Maybe it's the name. If you call yourself the World Trade Organization, you can't complain much if people dial your 800 number and gripe about world trade. If a bunch of heads of government plan a triumphalist self-celebration in Seattle, you can't blame party poopers for showing up to horn in on the publicity. But really, the WTO is O.K. Do the math. Or take it on faith...
...only gripe: a writer's first duty should be to his readers, not his subject. Sometimes I got the feeling that Lewis so reveres his protagonist that he became his apologist. Clark, we're told, is restlessly obsessed with finding the next new thing--which is, apparently, a good quality. But another interpretation might be that Clark is simply driven by the pursuit of filthy lucre. There has to be a higher purpose to life than making yourself rich. During the '80s, we knew that the people making their fortune on Wall Street were hardly role models; yuppie...
...complains, in part because most of the employees just graduated from college and don't know any better, and in part because, as one says, "we're in the music space, and people think that's cool." If any employees do gripe, Hinman--who recycles old business cards by crossing out his former employer's name and scribbling MongoMusic.com on them--can remind them that for six weeks in 1995 he lived in a tent on the roof of a Stanford physics lab. And despite the sweatshop conditions, Hinman is a benign manager. "When 5 o'clock on Friday rolls...