Are you making any industrywide efforts to push standards development? We're pretty much on the leading edge in many of these technologies, I think. There will be many other companies that in time follow us and end up with these scale issues. We're beginning to see that already. We believe that we are beginning to solve these problems. For the long run for eBay, we don't believe that building IT tooling and management tools is our core competency. Today it is something we have to do because we have no choice. In the long run we would rather be buying commercial off-the-shelf solutions to do that. The best way of making sure they meet our needs in the long term and minimizing the risk of adoption is to be an active participant in driving the standards that allow those integrated and interoperable solutions.

Is this a recent change for you and eBay to get involved? Yes it is. For eBay, we haven't been active participants particularly in standards bodies. Obviously eBay is heavily recognized as a brand, a consumer brand, but in terms of a technology player we haven't done much.

What convinced you, at this point, to take this step? I was recruited by eBay about a year ago, and there was an explicit recognition that what we were doing was grid, and we recognized that being on this path of just doing it exclusively ourselves -- it wasn't were we wanted to be. I actually work in eBay research labs, which is a group we have now that's dedicated to forward looking, two-to-five year worldview of what we're doing. That only was formed in the last 12 months. We need to make sure that the steps that we take quarterly -- we move very fast, we are deploying code to the site every two weeks -- those small steps have to be walking in a certain direction.