Audience: Are you guys a marketplace or a content provider? If you decide that the content is valuable then you could end up screwing the developers who are building services around it.
eBay's J2EE backend processing 400million transactions per day
Sun have a great Case Study document on their site about how eBay have migrated their system from a huge monolithic ISAPI DLL (3.3 million lines of C++ code), to a well structured J2EE EJB application.
About 75% of their daily traffic is now being handled by the J2EE backend, running on IBM WebSphere.
"We make our money one dollar at a time, literally $1.72 per listing, and a final value fee if the listed item sells."
"our users are on track to trade $21 billion worth of merchandise. "
"what eBay does is create efficient markets where there were quite inefficient markets before. We’re the major player in the two inefficient parts of the overall [product life cycle] bell curve. "
