[svlug] Time to dump those yahoo accounts

[Erik Steffl]

Don Marti wrote:
> begin Erik Steffl quotation of Sat, Feb 02, 2008 at 03:14:14PM -0800:
>> 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...
> 
> Yes, you're right.  Huge task.  The smart thing
> for them to do would be to re-brand Yahoo BSD
> as "Microsoft Windows 2009: Really Big Web Site
> Edition" and offer it as a product with Mono on top.
> The Yahoo software keeps working, they can say it's on
> "Windows", and life goes on.

   :-) of course it's not only OS but tools, libs, 
compilers/interpreters etc.

> No matter what happens, they're likely to kill off
> as many of the Yahoo web properties as possible,
> and turn them into redirects to MSN or Live.com
> projects that have more internal political juice, or
> to Facebook which is MSFT's next likely acquisition.
> (Like I said, the Google cafeteria is ordering extra
> prime rib for recruiting lunches.)

   possible but I guess they want yahoo for their users so it doesn't 
seem to make sense to get rid of the users

>>    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.
> 
> Any RHT boasting would be drowned out by "neener,
> neener, BSD rules" from the Apple advocates.

   why? but even if so, it's just as funny...

> But OS fanboyism is strong enough at MSFT that upper
> management would put BSD-to-Windows migration ahead
> of a lot of other tasks.

   you seem to ignore the size of the task... I can't find any good 
public reference but even from outside you can see that yahoo is not 
just serving some content with trivial processing. The amount of 
processing done behind the scenes is HUGE.

   HUGE.

   remember, the amount of hotmail software involved in conversion from 
unix to windows was tiny - _ONE_ team was involved, there were 90 
different transactions each implemented as a cgi program (and that took 
several tries over several years, the actual porting of software was not 
a big deal, they claim)

http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html

> I really wish they wouldn't.  Somebody need to put
> together a credible competitor to Google AdSense,
> and porting a bunch of existing software out of brand

   heh still in understatement contest?

> pride isn't going to make that happen.  An ad price
> war is just what a lot of independent sites need.
> 
> (Anyway, they won't structure it as a $50 billion
> acquisition -- it'll be Yahoo pays MSFT $50 billion
> to settle its patent licensing bill, MSFT buys Yahoo
> for $100 billion.)

   what?

	erik