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. How does Whitman do it Perhaps more important, how will she continute The company’s sky-high price/earings ratio of 143, based on 2001 estimated results, shows that investors are hungry for more, even faster, growth. Whitman has promised to transform eBay from an online auction house into a much bigger, general-put-pose shopping destination -- 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 boards, 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 fees on even the tiniest of transactions. Long after investors gave up on other dotcoms hammered their stocks, they are still betting on eBay.