[svlug] Time to dump those yahoo accounts

[Erik Steffl]

Don Marti wrote:
> 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?

   hmmm... true but still, why do you think they want yahoo? as far as I 
can tell we are mostly the brand with lots of users,

>>    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

   ok I can't talk about internal structure of yahoo but I didn't see it 
that way :-)

> 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.

   cause they were ashamed to use linux, that much is obvious (I guess 
that's what you implied)

> Now repeat with _every_ team, and _every_ application.  

   synergy :-) team and applications work together, what you can apply 
to one you cannot apply to interconnected group of them, expecting 
complexity to go up in linear (or even sort of linear) fashion, you soon 
get to effort being impossible

> 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.

   yep, that would be the end of it :-)

>>> (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!"

   are you saying they are going to sue themselves and to get out of 
that lawsuit they would get rid of freebsd/linux and switch to windows?

	erik