[svlug] Time to dump those yahoo accounts

[Don Marti]

begin Erik Steffl quotation of Sun, Feb 03, 2008 at 02:10:38AM -0800:
> Don Marti wrote:
> > 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

Drop by a FoxPro user group meeting some time.

A big company doesn't act like one economically
rational decision maker.  Companies are made up of
people with their own interests, and acquisitions
usually come together in a way that only makes
sense from a political point of view.  Remember when
Compaq bought Digital and they ended up with Compaq
engineering and Digital marketing?

>    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.

I agree.  But think of it from the point of view of
the top manager of a Yahoo service.   You want your
thing to stay, and the MSFT one to be rolled into
yours, not the other way around.  So you make your most
optimistic projection of the difficulty of moving it
to the MSFT platform.

>    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 like that report, but the most important part was
what it didn't say.  _Why_ was the application being
ported?  It just was.   That's just how it works.

Now repeat with _every_ team, and _every_ application.  

I completely agree with you that this
is an enormous task that will take years,
paralyze the company, and keep everyone from
getting anything else done.

> > (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?

Maybe not that much, but the situation just looks like
a good chance for MSFT to wave the "use a different
OS, owe us anyway" flag.  Patents also give them a
financial fig leaf for the OS migration -- "For what
we're paying to get all the Intellectual Property
Pack for BSD entitlements to run Yahoo Groups, we
could migrate to Windows and save!"

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org