Ask for It by Name!

If Pierre Omidyar had been a little quicker on his feet, the name “eBay” would be nothing but an annoying typo today.

In 1995, Omidyar, a French-Iranian immigrant and Silicon Valley veteran, created a web site he called Auction Web, an electronic flea market where visitors could hawk Beanie Babies, computer gear and the Pez dispensers his then-girlfriend (now wife) collected. Unfortunately, the internet gold rush was by then in full swing, and the domain name “auctionweb.com” was already taken, as was “echobay.com” (after Omidyar’s Echo Bay Technology Group). But “ebay.com” was ripe for the picking, and Omidyar snapped it up. And from that third-choice domain name the internet’s premier auction site grew. Today on a typical day there are more than 16 million items up for auction on eBay in more than 16,000 categories, and in 2002 eBay members unloaded more than $14 billion dollars worth of goods on the site. Presumably, Mrs. Omidyar now rarely gets outbid on Pez dispensers.

Since domain names on the internet do not distinguish between upper and lower case letters, the distinctive capitalization “eBay” was not, strictly speaking, necessary. But the alternative “ebay” would most likely have usually been pronounced “eh-bay” or “eb-ay,” more evocative of a startled diner (”Eb-AY! That’s hot!”) than a multi-billion dollar business empire. The lower-case “e” prefix also evokes the great 90s “e-commerce” boom, a boom of whose fizzle eBay is probably most the wildly successful survivor. As a verb, “to eBay” might well mean “to make pots of money from the very first day.”

For a car brand whose success has often been viewed as the triumph of a spunky underdog, Volkswagen’s most impressive accomplishment may be overcoming just about the worst origin imaginable.

Ferdinand Porsche was a highly respected automobile designer in 1933 when he was called to a meeting with Adolf Hitler, who had recently attained power in Germany. Hitler had a plan to solidify his support among the German people by promising them a low-priced, durable German-made car, the automotive equivalent of “a chicken in every pot.” Hitler not only laid out precise requirements for the car in his meeting with Porsche, but also insisted that the car be sold for under 1,000 Marks (about $250 at that time). And Hitler wanted Porsche to organize and oversee the project.

Porsche had no objection to the idea of a small, mass-produced car in itself. He had even produced two prototypes of such a vehicle several years earlier. It was the price that seemed impossible — even Henry Ford, the genius behind the mass production of cars, had never built a car he could sell for less than twice that price.

Within months, however, Porsche realized that Hitler’s impractical plan was an order, not a suggestion. Hitler began giving speeches in which he promised his followers that his regime would soon make the Volkswagen (literally, “Peoples’ Car”) available to every German citizen. So Porsche spent the next few years developing prototypes of the “Volkswagen” and gearing up production at a factory in Wolfsburg. Ironically, by 1939 Hitler’s appetite for war scuttled his dream of the Volkswagen. With the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland, production at the Wolfsburg plant was switched to military vehicles, and the first Volkswagen “Beetle” (of which more than 21 million were eventually sold) was not produced until after the war.