Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
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Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
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Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#2MySpace wasn't always .NET. It was ColdFusion before .NET v2 came out. Not that ColdFusion would have made any difference.
That said, I'd argue that no, Microsoft did not kill MySpace. Generalizations like this are wrong. There are many more .NET enterprise developers out there then there are Ruby or Node or Python. With quantity comes a varying degree of ability. MySpace killed themselves by lowering their standards to the easy-to-find .NET developer instead of setting the bar higher. Once you lower the standard by which you hire developers, it's a cycle. The new guys will lower the standard a little more to hire the next set, etc.
The lesson to be learned here is if you can't find a good developer, don't blame the technology stack you've selected, blame your recruiter. Find the person you want, they are out there.
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#3No, Facebook did. And they did it with crusty old PHP which pretty much proves the platform isn't going to make or break your business.
Finding good talent that's experienced with huge scale sites is not going to be easy regardless of language. It's not like MySpace could have been RoR and suddenly everything would have been simple, at their prime they were doing a ridiculous amount of traffic that only a handful of sites ever had experienced. There were probably 0 people experienced with PHP at Facebook's level, they all had to learn as they go and what they learned was they picked the wrong language so they created HipHop, a hack to overcome PHP and probably hundreds of others that help them scale better.
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#4tl;dr: No
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#5If a headline ends with a ?, the answer is generally "No."
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#6Twitter had scalability problems and they were on RoR, but it got solved. Scaling to those levels is always going to uncover problems in your architecture. What mattered was the way MySpace chose to execute, not the technology they did it with.
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#7I think it's simple. If you're business requires scaling at this level you need to have really good engineers and they need to have a lot of say in how things are done. I've worked with a number of "product" people from myspace, and they were definitely not doing 1 of these two, maybe both.
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#8Scoble's thesis seems way off. The problem with MySpace wasn't the technology, or even the site. It was the users of the site. It became a place that people didn't want to be associated with, while Facebook became that place. If MySpace instantly could flip a switch and turn into Facebook (codewise) hardly anything would have changed.
MySpace's problem IMO wasn't technical at all. They built a service that focused on users most likely to move, and repelled those most likely to stick with a platform.
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#9If the MS stack killed MySpace, then PHP made Facebook?
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#10Its funny I don't know (can't think of one) of a high traffic site that "died" due to technical failures (particularly scaling failures). Twitter had massive problems during its growth phase, Reddit has had similar problems. Does anyone have an example of a site that got "killed" by technical issues? I'm really curious.
Bad products tend to die or get replaced by superior offerings. Thats the nature of business.
Not being able to innovate rapidly because of technical lock in is the only way these types of issues can "kill" a site. But its very hard to quantify these types of issues. Between this article and Kevin Rose's statements about hiring B&C level programming talent it seems like a lot of engineers are getting tossed under buses, for poor management decisions.