I’ ve come to the San Jose office park where eBay is housed to nose around and figure out what makes this business apparently immune to the dot-com curse. Whitman has promised to transform eBay from an online auction house into a much bigger, general-purpose shopping destination B the first place people turn when they want to buy, well, anything at all. Analysts, who applaud this strategy and are reassured by Whitman’s record, see eBay as the one company that really taps into the boundless Potential of the internet. There’s truth in that. EBay owns no inventory or warehouses, which helps make it highly profitable. It has cleverly used e-mail, message hoards, and the natural watchfulness of its virtual community to forge bonds with customers and police the behavior of its buyers and sellers. Its Website enables small sellers to participate in a vast market place -- and lets eBay collect few on even the tiniest of trisections. Long alter investors gave up on other dot-coma hammered their stocks, they ere still betting on obey.