Who's ready for more ebay-paypal before and after?

here's one!

Before:

David Marcus is president of PayPal, where he has overall responsibility for establishing PayPal as the leading global payment service and helping to drive the future of money around the world. A mobile payments entrepreneur and product innovator, David brings a wealth of experience creating products that engage and delight customers - both businesses and consumers alike.

Most recently, David was PayPal's vice president of mobile, where he led the company's mobile business and product strategy, including the development and launch of PayPal Here and the newest version of PayPal's consumer application.

 
David has more than 15 years of mobile and telecommunications experience worldwide. He joined PayPal in the company's acquisition of Zong, a leading provider of payments through mobile carrier billing. Zong introduced a whole new way for consumers to pay quickly and easily, by simply entering their mobile phone numbers and billing the payment to their wireless account. Under David's leadership as founder and CEO, Zong developed relationships with more than 250 carriers and more than 1,000 online merchants. Zong was acquired by PayPal in August 2011.

David has a proven track record of starting and leading successful businesses. Prior to Zong, he started Echovox in Europe, a mobile media monetization company that later formed the foundation for Zong.

A native of France, David grew up in Paris and Geneva. At 23, he started his first company, GTN, which became one of the top three alternative carriers in Switzerland and was acquired by World Access in 2000. David first began learning how to become a technology entrepreneur at age 8, when he taught himself how to code on a PC

After:

A lifelong entrepreneur and respected product innovator with an impressive record of business success on two continents, David Marcus joined PayPal in 2011 to continue working on his long-term vision of digital payment technology that delivers seamless, connected, and convenient experiences at scale.

Born in France, David grew up in Paris and Geneva, and he taught himself to write computer code at age 8. He attended the University of Geneva for a year before dropping out to start his career as an entrepreneur. His first startup was GTN, which he launched in in 1996 when he was 23. GTN grew to become one of Switzerland's top three alternative telecommunications carriers and it was acquired by World Access in 2000. He then started Echovox, a pan-European mobile media and entertainment company. Echovox served as the foundation for Zong, the company he created in 2008 after he moved to Silicon Valley. Zong introduced an entirely new way for consumers to pay quickly and easily by entering their mobile phone number and charging the payment to their wireless account.

In 2011, Zong was acquired by PayPal and David assumed the role of vice president of mobile, leading the company's mobile products and business, which included the development and launch of PayPal Here.

David was named PayPal's president in April 2012. Driven by his belief that the essential foundation for business success is to understand everything through the eyes of customers, he is building on PayPal's great scale, resources, and technological innovation to deliver products that delight customers and will revolutionize payments by reinventing the shopping experience for businesses and their customers around the globe.

It would seem that Mr. Marcus is no longer interested in "establishing PayPal as the leading global payment service and helping to drive the future of money around the world. "

Hilarious! Rather than invoke Godwin's Law, I'll leave it to readers to appreciate just how spooky that statement is/was. Wow! There are other changes, and yet more in between in people start looking into it a bit further , but I feel this serves to illustrate the point

Stay tuned, lots and lots more where this came from, and I think you'll be getting some real eye-openers.

Here we are again. Going way way back this time;

Then:

Dear eBay Community

July 19, 1999

To our valued community members,

We want to thank you again for the patience and support you have shown us in the past month while we have been improving eBay's system. Now that we have learned more about the June 10-11 downtime, we want to describe many of the steps we have taken to address the issues, as well as to update you on the current status of the site.

The downtime on June 10 occurred in part when a software update triggered a series of events that led to the corruption of our data and prevented us from restarting our system. We worked around the clock to restore all data and rebuild our system.

Following the June 10-11 downtime, we immediately began a comprehensive site stability effort to address the issues associated with the downtime. We are working on four key areas:

1. Strengthening our engineering staff
2. Further enhancing our testing processes and decreasing the number of changes made to the system
3. Installing recovery mechanisms
4. Building future infrastructure for stability, performance and scalability

1. Engineering Staff

To meet the performance needs of our system, we grew our engineering staff by 75% in Q2. We will continue to rapidly grow our engineering staff this quarter.

We are working closely with our key vendors to improve site stability and performance. Sun, Oracle and Veritas dedicated their best people to work with eBay full time, and they identified a list of actions for enhancing site stability and performance. We have already taken action on the low-risk, high-benefit recommendations, and we are currently working on implementing many more.

Bob Quinn joined us as our Chief Information Officer, and he is focused on managing the site to ensure site stability and performance. Bob has been with Sun Microsystems for eleven years - most recently as Vice President and CIO of Computer Systems. Bob has had over twenty years of experience in managing mission-critical systems, from mainframes to client-server systems. We are confident that he has the management experience and knowledge to take eBay to the next level of stability and reliability.

In addition, Mark Ryan will join us as our Chief Technology Officer. He will ensure that our technology strategy is aligned with the tremendous growth we will continue to experience. He joins us from IBM's elite team for Complex Architectural Solutions and is an expert in data center design, Internet backoffice and crisis recovery situations. As a recognized expert in complex architectural solutions, Mark has helped some of the world's best companies stabilize their system and applications designs, and to build new scaling capabilities for the future.

2. Testing Processes and Change Management

We not only strengthened our engineering staff, but we are also reinforcing our testing processes. We are implementing more rigorous and disciplined stress testing. We are now making changes to eBay's site at a slower rate, focusing on changes that enhance stability, improve scalability, and improve the usability of the site. Such changes include software upgrades on July 16 to enhance stability, modifying functions (such as the seller search list and My eBay) to improve their performance, and improving the user interface.

3. Recovery Mechanisms

Currently, we have implemented the hardware and software necessary to create a "warm backup" of the eBay system, and it is currently being tested. The "warm backup" is a duplicate set of hardware and software that "mirrors" the main eBay database server and is updated constantly.

Should an extended downtime occur, we would bring the warm backup up-to-date (so that no items, bids, or other updates would be lost) and then bring the service up on the backup machine. Since the warm backup machine is an identical copy of the main server, there would be no differences between the two.

This process is not instantaneous, and it would be used primarily to avoid extended downtimes. In some circumstances (such as a single CPU failure), it may be faster to have the main system recover itself, rather than moving to the backup.

During one of our regularly scheduled maintenance downtimes in July, we plan to switch to the warm backup machine, just as we would during an extended downtime. This will verify that the backup machine and our procedures for switching to it are reliable.

Furthermore, over the next few months, we will be working on new technologies that will make the warm backup "hot" and will allow rapid transition if we have system downtime. eBay is working closely with its hardware and software vendors to ensure that we implement the most effective and reliable backup system. We are committed to communicating our progress to you as we have more to report.

4. Future Infrastructure

During Q2, in order to scale the system and make it more reliable, we invested over $10 million in hardware to support our customers' growing needs. This investment was more than three times that in Q1. We added eight 350Mhz processors to our database server. We also added another Sun E10000 Starfire to process search requests. On the day we installed this new capacity, we processed half a million more searches than we did the previous day.

Michael Wilson, Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist, is focused on creating the next generation system architecture, which will provide state-of-the-art site stability, performance and functionality. It will also allow the site to scale for future growth, without loss of performance or reliability.

We are dedicated to our goal of providing dependable service, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Your success is crucial to us, and we are committed to providing you with the highest level of service and reliability.

Regards,

Meg and Pierre

Now:

eBay Mum on Glitch that Blocked Product Photos

"...Our initial response to your inquiry will remain our statement for this technical issue..."

Strange Pop Up on eBay Is A Recurring Problem

"...Another seller wrote, "Ebay disconnected me, too, but not before assuring me this message is NOT from eBay..."

...As someone pointed out in the thread, EcommerceBytes previously reported this problem, which is a recurring glitch of some kind. We're waiting a response from eBay.

I could post the link to the ebay announcements board here, but I think we all know that is rarely even used anymore. Even as there are more glitches which are more serious than ever, and dead silence about serious issues across the board.