[svlug] Time to dump those yahoo accounts

[Erik Steffl]

Don Marti wrote:
> begin Christian Einfeldt quotation of Fri, Feb 01, 2008 at 12:40:02PM -0800:
> 
>> Yeah, acceptance seems likely, but looky how much ground Microsoft will have to
>> make up to catch Google:
> 
> The big impact will be the feature-development time
> lost, while they move Yahoo's infrastructure over
> to the MSFT platform.   (MSFT is actually much more
> technically dogmatic than your typical Linux-using
> company.)  It'll be like Hotmail, but on a larger scale.

   (disclaimer: I work for yahoo (so I'm trying not to use any inside 
facts explicitly plus I guess I am biased))

   like hotmail on a larger scale? shooting for some kind of 
understatement award?

   just try to imagine the amount of software needed for everything 
yahoo does (even if you strip it down to essentials), the users, the 
advertisement, the content and the need for everything to sort of work 
together...

   do you think it's even remotely comparable to hotmail: " Restricted, 
well-controlled application. The application under UNIX was a collection 
of CGI programs, serving about 100 distinct URLs, which have been 
converted to an ISAPI module. The programs are written in C++. The 
entire application is under the control of one team, and its 
architecture is well understood by all of the teams (dev, test and 
operations). Updates are only due to scheduled code releases, or 
hotfixes." (from http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html)

   that's only front end, they tried several times and it took years.

   I am not even talking about ability of windows platform to perform 
well enough, I am talking about sheer amount of processing that is 
happening and porting it from one system to another would be huge even 
if the systems were pretty much the same... did you notice how long it 
takes companies to go upgrade to newer versions of _same_ software? like 
databases, perl/python/yourScriptingLanguageOfChoice, new GCC version 
etc. Those project take years...

   heh it's would be pretty funny, if microsoft actually buys yahoo then 
microsoft will be one of the prominent success story of apache, freebsd, 
linux, perl, php, gcc etc. Imagine redhat boasting - hey even micosoft 
uses our OS! now that would be a lol moment.

	erik