Sean Donahue

Webb is well aware of eBay’s technology woes, and has plans to fix them. Rather than pointing the finger at hardware and application vendors such as Sun Microsystems or Oracle, though, the unassuming new technology chief hammers away at eBay’s need to build out its back-end systems with the same vigor the company originally devoted to designing its front-end applications. It’s a situation many Web companies, rushing to launch their own online services, may find uncomfortably familiar.

EBay has attributed its numerous outages this summer variously to hardware, software or network problems. What’s going on?

We’ve had a number of low-level systems problems, no two of them the same. The front-end application itself, the stuff that’s real brain surgery, is actually scaling very well and has lots of headroom. But we haven’t implemented all of the operations excellence measures we need in the way of hardware redundancy and operational procedures. That has caused us some of the gotchas.

What types of redundancies and procedures are you talking about?

The two longest outages we’ve ever had, back in June, were tied to issues in the database server. To prevent that from happening again we’ve purchased another set of Sun Starfire E10000s, essentially replicating our production environment with another whole production environment. We are in what we call warm back-up state right now, where we can switch over to a second database if the main servers fail, and be operational again within a couple of hours. But we’re still working toward a high-availability, fully fault-tolerant back-up, where the switch-over is almost instantaneous. That will be in place in the fourth quarter.

Is it possible to create a full duplicate of eBay’s system, running at all times, that can automatically take over if the main system goes down?

We essentially have that at the front-end applications server layer. Even if your session and interaction fails, you can switch over to any of the 120 other Windows NT servers were running, and it’s transparent to you. What I just described in terms of warm back-up and high availability are very much like having another full back-end, too. The tough part is keeping those two systems totally in sync when you have the speed and the amount of transactions we have on eBay. We have to go through some heroics to make sure we keep both systems totally tuned and ready, but fundamentally that’s where we’re headed.

Why weren’t these steps taken ahead of time, rather than after eBay suffered these outages?

Even though we certainly have stumbled, it is by no means an indictment of the folks who made this site the wild success that it is. I think a lot of the energy and focus was put into developing features, functions and the right kind of application architecture for the front end. Ebay didn’t do as stellar a job of building the underlying infrastructure as it needed to. Then things just grew faster on the applications side than the infrastructure was able to keep up with.

Frankly, if they’d done a lot of work on making sure the site could handle anything, and not done that applications work, I don’t think they would have had the success they’ve had. And if the application itself was in trouble and breaking all the time, our cycles to recover would be a lot longer than just figuring out the right kind of redundancies to implement.

EBay already has two other technology executives, CIO Bob Quinn and CTO Mark Ryan. Why did the company need to bring in another technologist?

EBay is a technology company, period. The end. Our product is based entirely on making sure we have the underpinnings of a great system and a great series of processes. In a traditional computing environment you know where your inputs are coming from and you can control them. But in the Web world, anybody can touch you from anywhere. It’s just some real hard work to get all these layers of technology synchronized and scaleable. I believe the skill-set they wanted from me, more than anything else, is my “been there, done it” experience with operational excellence in a high-volume, traditional environment, along with a knowledge of what’s happening in the Web world.

How much more complicated is it to manage something like eBay’s system, with its millions of auctions and users and hundreds of unique features, compared to a more standard e-commerce site such as Gateway?

Gateway’s system actually deals with far more complexity than eBay’s, in that it must be able to configure a PC that has 2000 different parts on the fly, and then actually produce and ship out 25,000 of those orders a day. It has to tie together manufacturing systems, shop-floor automation, supply-chain management and all that good stuff. Asking your Web system to handle a product directly configurable to each customer’s specifications, and do that flawlessly, is not trivial by any stretch of the imagination.

The difference with eBay is that you get simpler transactions, but the volume of interactions is much higher and they come in bursts. The system has to work in real time with no tolerance for error. Just take the example of purchasing a PC online. The Web system has to be full time and ready to go when you enter your order, but then what are you interested in? You want to track your order through the system and know when you’re going to get it. Those iterations of customer updates are infrequent, because there are only so many stages in the shipping process. You can have batch processes to handle those interactions on a regular basis and they look like they’re working in real time.

But with an auction, you want to know every second when somebody has outbid you. Those have to be real-time interactions, and the volume of them is what separates us from the rest of the Internet pack in terms of complexity.

What attracted you to this new position?

I had a great job at Gateway, and they’re an Internet savvy company with a whole heck of lot more complex issues to solve. But eBay is an absolute market leader, crafting out an entirely new business model that I just fundamentally believe in, where people get to decide how world is going to work from a commerce standpoint. To be a part of the company at this stage, and to clearly contribute to taking one of its most critical hurdles to success off the table was too great an opportunity to pass up.

Can eBay or any other Web company ever guarantee 100-percent reliability?

If anyone ever said their site was 100 percent reliable I wouldn’t trust them. That’s nirvana. But the answer is yes, if you don’t grow and don’t scale. If you stop your growth and you spend an unbelievable amount of money you can make anything almost perfect. The tricky equation is how to deal with growth and money and time elements, and get them all working in harmony. You’ve got a whole host of things inside that can happen everyday.

I won’t guarantee you eBay will never go down again. The worst thing we can do is give people a false sense of security. But I will guarantee that were putting a system in place that will make for longer periods of time between outages, and shorter outages when they do happen. We’ve got to build in the redundancy and the reliability to handle the Internet’s unique volume and interaction characteristics, and that’s an art rather than a science today.

So, have you bought anything on eBay yet?

Absolutely. I collect sports memorabilia, but I haven’t found a ton of that because every time I go searching I end up with my kids looking for Beanie Babies. In fact, one of the ways we got our kids excited about moving up here from San Diego was by bribing them: Instead of an allowance they’re going to get a certain amount of money to spend each month on eBay. So I expect to be looking for a lot more Beanie Babies.

By 1982, Kahn had emigrated to the United States and used his programming experience to create Borland International (now Inprise), a pioneering software development tools company that was for a time one of the world’s largest software companies. At Borland, Kahn waged a tough head-to-head battle with Microsoft that eventually led to Borland’s near financial collapse and Kahn’s resignation in 1994. But Kahn, 47, isn’t bitter about the experience. Instead, he credits his Microsoft-dealt defeat with helping spur his move to the Internet.

Starfish Software, which Kahn founded with Sonia Lee in 1994, focuses exclusively on technology that links Web applications to wireless devices such as cell phones, hand-held organizers and pagers, as well as desktop PCs. His vision is of a future that is not PC-dependent, but one in which computer appliances like cell phones and organizers connect to the Net or with each other to provide us with all the information we need.

Wireless giant Motorola, impressed with the company’s wireless Internet technology, snapped up Starfish in 1998. Kahn has retained the CEO slot in Starfish’s Santa Cruz, Calif., offices, and this year launched a start-up called LightSurf, which he says is a top-secret venture that will expand wireless Net capabilities to include imaging and photographic applications. (Despite my asking many questions, he would say no more about LightSurf.)

Though his passion for technology remains keen, Philippe Kahn’s priorities have changed a fair bit from his warring-with-Microsoft era. These days, whether he’s playing jazz, snowboarding, sailing competitively or building new technology, having fun is what inspires him the most. Salon spoke with Kahn while he was in San Francisco preparing for a sailing race.

As a former Microsoft competitor, do you have any advice for Judge Jackson as he prepares a decision on the antitrust suit?

Although I have competed with Microsoft, I have always preferred to pursue innovation rather than litigation. I don’t want to get into whether Microsoft is a monopoly and what’s legal or not, because I’m a technologist and I’m personally not interested in that discussion.

It’s no secret that Microsoft doesn’t succeed through innovation. They succeed through leveraging their incredible position in operating systems and their financial power to move into new markets. Whether that’s illegal or not, I don’t know. Actually, to date the courts have said it’s perfectly legal. Take the complaint that Microsoft gave away its browser for free just to try and put Netscape out of business. Isn’t that exactly the same thing Sun Microsystems plans to do with Star Office? They’re going to give away Star Office to compete against Microsoft Office, and that has nothing to do with thin-clients or innovation. It’s simply Sun doing to Microsoft what Microsoft did to Netscape and Borland. Is that illegal? I’m not sure, but so far no court has said it’s illegal.

As far as a broken-up Microsoft, people should be concerned that they may get what they ask for, and that two Microsofts may in fact increase Microsoft’s total market dominance. Look at AT&T, Lucent and the Baby Bells: They’re are all doing very well right now.

Do you carry any lessons from your years of competition with Microsoft into new business ventures such as Starfish Software?

Borland/Inprise competed very successfully with Microsoft for more than 10 years, until Microsoft’s position in operating systems became so dominant that it became very hard to grow a profitable professional tools business. The main lesson here is to make sure that a new business model remains viable even if a larger competitor expands its share of a related market.

When building Starfish, and now LightSurf, we made sure that we focused on markets that are new, that are growing fast, and where there is an assurance of diversity. Wireless Internet is growing super fast because one of the most desired and popular devices in the world is the cell phone. Within the next three years, most digital cell phones will also be wireless Internet devices. That’s hundreds of millions of new wireless Internet devices, and diversity is assured because the wireless world is already diverse with key players such as Motorola, Nokia and Ericsson. Nobody is at risk of establishing a monopoly at this point.

Do you think that the Internet, compared with other markets, is more welcoming to diversity and innovation?

Absolutely. By definition the Internet is an open environment, and I think the Internet will not accept a dominant player. You know, when AOL tries to play tricks with its instant messaging, people say, “Hey, that’s horseshit, you can’t do that. You make Microsoft look good when you do that.” I think the Internet has a global conscience that a closed environment like the PC-world doesn’t have. It’s going to be very hard for anyone to eat up the Internet market.

Motorola would love to be the monopoly in wireless Internet, and so would Nokia, but they won’t be. The pain of switching cell phones is far less than the pain of switching your personal computer.

What else attracts you to the Internet?

It’s a technology-driven environment, which some people may forget. A lot of the so-called heroes of the Internet are basically glorified retailers and mail-order catalogs. They’re extremely successful financially, but from a technology standpoint there’s not much innovation there. But right now, wireless Internet is all about innovation because it’s a new frontier. We’re talking now about the Internet becoming a complete, empowering, universal way of networking, not just in your cubicle, but anywhere, anytime. I think we’re going to see the Internet enable two-way communications in a much more powerful way, with medical applications, sound, images and other applications. We haven’t seen anything yet compared to what’s going to happen with wireless Internet.

Is your focus on mobile computing a break from your programming and tools background, or was it a logical evolution?

With Starfish and now LightSurf, Sonia Lee and myself looked at the “next step.” I like to say that in the 1970s with the Micral, we built the first PC. In the 1980s we brought object computing to the PC with the best rapid application development tools. Now in the 1990s we’ve focused on the smaller devices and on wireless Internet. My career has always been focused on developing efficient technology that is innovative, fast and compact, which also are key elements to success in the wireless Internet market. It’s a very challenging technical world that calls on my entire engineering background, because there are super-scalable server components, ultra-small programs embedded in the devices, and then there’s desktop programming to make applications work with Outlook or other systems. So it takes a lot of know-how in many different areas, and that’s what makes this world a lot of fun.

What are some of the main obstacles to making the true wireless Internet a reality?

For the industry, infrastructure is the biggest risk, no question. Fortunately, we see billions of dollars being invested in wireless infrastructure worldwide, so the question is not whether it’s going to happen, but when. I say certainly less than three years.

We recently saw how expensive and risky the infrastructure market can be when satellite communications company Iridium declared bankruptcy. Was that a company-specific execution problem, or symptomatic of an industry-wide weakness?

I think Iridium never really understood its own business model. There’s a tremendous market for the infrastructure they’ve built, but not the market they decided to go after. Iridium went after businesspeople with a world phone, but the phone didn’t work inside any office building because it was line-of-sight — you had to go outside to get a connection! I don’t know what they were thinking there.

But they can still leverage that infrastructure in more specific markets. For example, forget the telephone and look at Iridium’s two-way pager application. It’s the only global pager you can get today, and that is a tremendous product that they really haven’t marketed. I know because I use one myself. I was recently in New Zealand on a snowboarding trip, and I received a page in the middle of the Southern Alps, close to Antarctica. Nothing else could reach me there. I will pay a premium for that, and many other people will, too. Cellular phones are not everything. In fact, I think global wireless messaging is more interesting than cellular phones.

So even with all your interests outside of technology — sailing, snowboarding, your jazz band — it sounds like your career in technology isn’t ending anytime soon.

I love what I do. My family have been engineers for five generations and I think that we may have had a mutation in our gene pool. But to keep things fresh I’m trying not to do the same thing twice. There comes a time when you don’t do things for money, you do them for the fun. It’s the same reason, probably, that Miles Davis was playing for so long. Miles didn’t have to play trumpet all his life, he didn’t have to make a living, but he wanted to play. And I feel very fortunate that that’s the case for me.