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Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

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Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#81

Post by recoiledsnake »

famousactress wrote: post #45
dandelany wrote: post #27

".Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace." This is such BS, I can't even read it without physically cringing. I work for a ~400-person business that stands up .NET websites at breakneck speed, and we do it well. People who blame their problems on technical infrastructure decisions almost ALWAYS do so because it's…

.Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace. For the record, I think it's irrelevant.. but absolutely I think it's true. It doesn't mean .NET isn't capable, or that lots of .NET programmers aren't capable... Just that .NET is way more popular in the enterprise than on the web, and that the work that gets done at most…

So PHP developers are "constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace"? (Facebook had to a TON of stuff to make it scale).

Ruby developers? (Ref: Twitter)

Java developers?

I think only HTML programmers are the only ones who are constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#82

Post by rburhum »

Give me a break!!! Teenagers with animated gifs, a horrible taste for colors and true angst along with Rupert Murdoch's old school leadership killed myspace. Before you blame the stack, look at the content and lack of a proper newsfeed. Ugh

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#83

Post by yesbabyyes »

rbanffy wrote: post #55
strlen wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh wow. Wow. I hereby revoke my previous statement. These are some God-awful infrastructure decisions. Version control and a staging server are the most basic necessities for a scalable dev project. I even set them up when I'm working on a personal project, alone. Exactly. This seems to follow the Kevin Rose formula: make horrible decisions (or be entirely absent from decision making) without any understanding of t…

> prior to Facebook, P in LAMP also stood for Perl The P in LAMP has been associated with PHP for much longer than the existence of Facebook.

Maybe. We did LAMP before I heard the term, with a site in '98, but then it was definitely Perl. I've understood it as mainly Perl, and later PHP or Python as possibilities.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#84

Post by desigooner »

strlen wrote: post #60
rbanffy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> prior to Facebook, P in LAMP also stood for Perl The P in LAMP has been associated with PHP for much longer than the existence of Facebook.

I've always seen it stand for Python, Perl or PHP-- with many shops specifically stating "P for PHP" or "P for Perl". Yahoo hasn't settled on PHP vs. mod_perl (as a replacement for a C based template system filo built) until early 2000s and (when I was there) still had many Perl based services in production.

When I interned at SBC/Yahoo DSL around 'mid 2000s, they used the LAMPerl stack quite extensively.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#85

Post by jdavid »

dandelany wrote: post #27

".Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace." This is such BS, I can't even read it without physically cringing. I work for a ~400-person business that stands up .NET websites at breakneck speed, and we do it well. People who blame their problems on technical infrastructure decisions almost ALWAYS do so because it's…

As an ex-MySpace ID MDP employee we had staging servers. There were like 2 or 3 different levels of test, of course, that might have been unique to our team.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#86

Post by calloc »

jdavid wrote: post #54
brown9-2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once the free parking was pulled from MySpace, 50% of every team was laid off and all of the momentum was pulled from the company. Can you explain what you mean by "free parking" here?

Sorry, for being overly creative. "free parking" is a spot on monopoly where the rules specifically state that once a user lands on the 'free parking' space no money is received. however, in almost every monopoly game i have played, players take fines/ taxes and put them in the middle of the board, and when a player lands on 'free parking' they get the funds. It's an example of not following the rules as a point of c…

Putting the money in the middle and getting it when you land on free parking always made the game more fun as the pot got bigger you just tried to keep throwing the correct number to get the huge pot in the middle to hopefully help you get out of bankruptcy!

I never had a MySpace page, I found that the disjointed looks across peoples profiles and seemingly no direction as to what it was to be used for rather annoying and made me consider MySpace as a joke. Facebook won me over in that they had a consistent layout, and no goddamn music playing when I went to a users profile page, and I can't even begin to count the amount of friends I have that agree with me, but I can count the amount of friends on one hand who have a MySpace page.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#88

Post by umjames »

bradleyland wrote: post #33
dandelany wrote: post #27

".Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace." This is such BS, I can't even read it without physically cringing. I work for a ~400-person business that stands up .NET websites at breakneck speed, and we do it well. People who blame their problems on technical infrastructure decisions almost ALWAYS do so because it's…

As they say, "A bad workman blames his tools." It's really hard to say that they failed because of Microsoft tools. The fact is that they made bad decisions in how they would implement and use their tools. There's nothing to prove they wouldn't have done the same dumb things with open source tools.

Exactly, a tool (technology-based or otherwise) is just a multiplier for the person wielding it. It's the people wielding the tool that make the difference.

Management is not excluded from this either. They have to:

1. know, in depth, the business they are in and the tools they use (or could use) to achieve their goals

2. listen to what their team tells them and provide an environment where they can do the job right

It sounds like there was a lot of micro-management and putting out fires in this case.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#89

Post by calloc »

Having read the article, as well as Scoble article linked I would have to disagree that it was the Microsoft stack. There was just not enough investment in their programmers. I work at a small startup where money is rather tight while we raise funding and attempt to get contracts in, yet us developers get what we need. Every developer has at least two screens (be it a laptop and a large LCD, or a desktop with two the same monitors). We can ask for new staging servers, we can ask for more memory, we can set up our own infrastructure, and we can make technical decisions.

Once you start taking away the ability of devs to think for themselves or feel comfortable doing work it makes it harder to be motivated to come into work and fix the issues, and if management isn't listening to the complaints about the need to re-factor then what is the point? Adding hack onto hack gets boring pretty damn fast.

MySpace also lost in that they really didn't have a direction of where they were going (at least that is what it looks like looking in). Blogs, music, status updates, what was it supposed to be? And it didn't help that all over their web properties they didn't have a consistent look and feel because they allowed everyone and their mother to skin their profile page how they saw fit leaving it a disjointed mess that just made me hate the site more.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#90

Post by mhewett »

I'm not sure these technology-based analyses are correct. I had four teenagers at the time and they all switched from MySpace to Facebook because the MySpace pages got cluttered with glaring ads. The Facebook layout was cleaner and had no ads (at the time). There was no problem with site speed.
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