Is MySpace's death spiral due to bets on Los Angeles and Microsoft? | Hacker News Reader

Is MySpace's death spiral due to bets on Los Angeles and Microsoft?

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20 pointsscottieh24 comments

No- I worked for a high-traffic .NET based company in LA that was doing great. Myspace just had a crappy product that couldn't keep up with the Facebook steamroller. I think it's as simple as that.

I think it has more to do with terrible design and a lot of bugs. How many pages had 3-4 videos all playing at once with sparkles stabbing you in the eye. When FaceBook came on the scene it was clean and stable.

Ugh, too many of them. I put my vote in for the same: too much freedom with web page layouts and horrendous bugs. Too many times I would try to go back to my profile after having my senses violated only to be greeted with a page telling me that I "must be logged in to do that," never minding the fact that I already was.

When someone blames their failure on their technology, I'm always highly skeptical. Good developers and good management (equivalently: good strategy and good execution) could use Cobol and still beat super-advanced alien technology if it's being run by a pack of monkeys. I'm not going to comment on whether .NET is a good choice or not, but even if it was not as good as alternatives, I strongly doubt that MySpace would have beaten Facebook if only it were on a different platform.

The Microsoft "bet" seems to be working out for the StackExchange crew...

Ah, good point. Any details on what they're running?

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/10369/which-tools-an...

Scaling a Q&A site and scaling a social network have very very little in common.

StackEx is also 2 orders of magnitude smaller than MySpace at its peak.

Of all the problems Myspace had those two are probably the least significant, if they're even problems at all.

Honestly, I never got the impression that there was much competition at all. Myspace was too early, made some design mistakes, and focused on the wrong initial market. Meanwhile Facebook focused on doing their own thing, which turned out to have way more potential, and zoomed by Myspace when social networking finally caught on. It just turned out that social isn't a space with many consolation prizes for second place.

As the age-old saying goes, "A poor workman always blames his tools." Where is the accountability? I would be much more interested in hearing some retrospect on what they did wrong.

The argument that you can't do something big and challenging unless the talent all lives in one small area is clearly refuted by the movie industry.

Brian Norgard, who started the thread, mentioned he "was in the belly of the beast due to the acquisition of my first company," which was Newroo.

http://techcrunch.com/2006/03/14/fox-to-acquire-startup-newr...

there's a troll in the conversation but interesting none the less.

The whole conversation feels like a troll.

Interesting conversation that could possibly takes hours to get to the bottom of. The MSFT bet was clearly a poor one at best.

I agree with the MSFT bet (.NET is such a heavy toolset), but I think the Los Angeles argument is also interesting.

Does starting a successful company depend on having a geographical talent base, heavily grouped together?

.NET is such a heavy toolset

What does that mean, specifically? I've found it is a great stack, and the biggest problem it has is public perception :)

What do you mean by "heavy toolset"? There's too many already-written tools and utilities?

Is it heavier than Java? People have run some pretty big and busy sites on Java fine (iTunes store, for example).

What makes a Microsoft technology stack a poor choice? Any site at the scale of MySpace is going to have hundreds of hacks to make it scale that no one wants to touch. MySpace was able to launch their 1.0 in days and become the leading social network (for a while), without major scaling issues.

Any site at the scale of MySpace is going to have hundreds of hacks to make it scale that no one wants to touch.

I disagree.

From what I saw while I was there, Google scales through good process and discipline. I'm sure there are hacks that I didn't see that make things more efficient. However if you are truly dependent on scary hacks just to keep running, then you will fall apart when your scale increases, those hacks fail, and nobody knows how to make it work. Which is why Google is so big on scaling through good process and discipline.

As for why Microsoft is possibly a poor choice, there is a lot more institutional experience out there for making Linux scale than making the Microsoft stack scale. Furthermore Microsoft forces you to pay a hefty licensing tax for very unclear returns. So you're paying money to sail into uncharted territory and hope you can make it work.

But all that said, if they have architectural problems, odds are very high that the biggest problems are in the software that they wrote rather than the technology stack they use.

I heard a rumor that they used to be on Cold Fusion? If true, a move from that to any other technology, including Microsoft stack, would be a good move.

While Los Angeles doesn't stereotypically have good developers, good developers exist here. Demand Media and Google have 300+ people offices here. I suspect the problem is, either MySpace didn't hire good developers/architects, or MySpace hired them but management didn't listen to them.

Yes, I think they used to run CF.

Any MySpacers here that got laid off or looking to jump ship?

Well, I'm a developer at Leads360 in El Segundo, CA. And we're hiring developers right now! I've interviewed several MySpacers already and extended offers to a few. We hope to get more :)

Send me your resume, if interested. Good luck.

Bill Paetzke: bpaetzke@leads360.com

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