
Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace? - dolinsky
http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/3/25/did-the-microsoft-stack-kill-myspace.html
======
dandelany
".Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not
constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup
pace."

This is such BS, I can't even read it without physically cringing. I work for
a ~400-person business that stands up .NET websites at breakneck speed, and we
do it well. People who blame their problems on technical infrastructure
decisions almost ALWAYS do so because it's easier than addressing the true
underlying problems.

"The biggest problem was they didn't allow the developers to have staging or
testing servers -- they deployed on the production servers on the first go-
around... And all this with no change management or control. No versioning
either."

Oh wow. Wow. I hereby revoke my previous statement. These are some God-awful
infrastructure decisions. Version control and a staging server are the most
basic necessities for a scalable dev project. I even set them up when I'm
working on a personal project, alone.

~~~
sajidnizami
I too work with sites hitting high visitor count but I have to agree there
with the article. Most .Net people I've interviewed think page load speed
doesn't matter. They write code to satisfy the requirement and are quite good
at it, but it ends there.

Remember when people used ASP.Net web forms and it was hard to get rid of
viewstate in the rendered page, and only the people who knew internals of
platform well could fix it. It drove SEO's mad and they started to recommend
staying away from web forms.

I agree with you on the staging and testing servers. Not having them is
planning for disaster.

~~~
recoiledsnake
>Most .Net people I've interviewed think page load speed doesn't matter.

Have you informed them that you work with a high traffic site? Most intranet
sites are not high traffic, so if they're spending time pre-optimizing for
speed instead of features/development time, they're actually wasting the
company's money.

And what has viewstate got to do with SEO? You lost me.

For SEO friendly URLs, all you need a is URL Rewriter.
[http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=a...](http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=asp.net+url+rewriter&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&channel=suggest)

>only the people who knew internals of platform well could fix it

That's true of any platform out there.

~~~
pixelbath
SEOs prefer to have the "relevant content" as high on the page as possible.
Since viewstate is just a large blob, many SEOs assume it decreases relevancy.
I've never seen results that confirm this assumption.

Edit: See sajidnizami's post for the relevant StackOverflow question. Though,
this still doesn't make sense to me logically. Why would a search engine
disregard a (reasonably) longer page?

~~~
sajidnizami
Longer page would increase page load time. A longer page with viewstate at the
beginning would delay loading of content. Google penalizes pages that load
slower.

[http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-
sit...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-
in-web-search-ranking.html)

------
jdavid
I worked at MySpace on the MDP ( MySpace Developer Platform ) team. My team,
MySpaceID, was the one that implemented Oauth 1, 2, 2.0a and all of the
external REST libraries. We worked closely with the activity streams team and
the OpenSocial Team. We also launched the MySpace JSL or MySpace Connect. We
were the 1st to do a popup login flow for OpenID and several other cool things
MySpace was doing to catch Facebook. We might have done it if Google did not
pull the money.

Once the free parking was pulled from MySpace, 50% of every team was laid off
and all of the momentum was pulled from the company.

Working with .Net was not an issue, and in some cases it was a benefit.

There were however huge cultural problems with FOX. Here are a few.

Developers used were given one display, not two. Screens were 1280x1024. I
bought my own displays and had my manager order a custom computer for me with
dual video card support.

Fox was a closed source company, and so when we were working on Open Tech like
Oauth and OpenSocial gadget servers, we had to do it as closed source
software. We had no peer review. It made it really hard to ship and test
something when you don't have linkedin, google, bebo, and twitter reviewing
your code. On top of that when those companies found a bug, we had to re-
implement that code in .Net. On top of that MySpace and .Net were well
designed for strong typing and those types work a bit different than Java.

It didn't take a lot of time to port so, we kept doing it, but you have to
think about this, you are at a race with a company like Facebook who had zero
profit motive at the time, and billion in funding and a ground up stack.
Meanwhile MySpace was just clearing out cold-fusion and we had really old
blogging platforms that could not just get ripped out.

We also had management that didn't want to piss off users and so we would have
2 or 3 versions of the site out there, and we required users to upgrade to new
versions.

What MySpace had was Cultural Debt, and a fear of destroying what they had.
Facebook won because they were Socratic to the core.

~~~
brown9-2
_Once the free parking was pulled from MySpace, 50% of every team was laid off
and all of the momentum was pulled from the company._

Can you explain what you mean by "free parking" here?

~~~
jdavid
Sorry, for being overly creative.

"free parking" is a spot on monopoly where the rules specifically state that
once a user lands on the 'free parking' space no money is received. however,
in almost every monopoly game i have played, players take fines/ taxes and put
them in the middle of the board, and when a player lands on 'free parking'
they get the funds.

It's an example of not following the rules as a point of culture.

The deal soured with Google because the terms were around pageviews and
clicks. MySpace and Fox decided to target those terms to maximize revenue. The
result was that MySpace added unneeded page flow for just about every user
action. It destroyed UX and pissed off Google. Our team kept joking with
management that we were going to create a MySpace-Lite as a side project from
our REST APIs and to get rid of all of the crap.

    
    
      WE SHOULD HAVE DONE IT.  WE SHOULD HAVE CREATED MYSPACE-LITE
    

The Deal with Google was worth $300 million a year on total revenue of $750
million a year. MySpace Music was loosing the company mad money, it was and is
a flawed model. Our team wanted to create an API where games and sites could
access the music, and to create open playlists. We wanted to make the music
open, and then work to license it. We were told that it was not possible.

~~~
icefox
Sidenote : Growing up I also played monopoly that way and various other house
rules. After playing some Euro games I went back and read the monopoly rules
and played a game by the rules. No free parking, no extra houses or hotels,
forced auctions, etc. The game took 45 minutes and was way more fun. Made
Monopoly actually enjoyable again, though not as good as most of the really
good Euro games out today.

~~~
Splines
Even more OT: The electronic versions of Monopoly actually vastly improve the
game. No more counting money, and strongly enforced rules make for a faster,
more efficient and entertaining game.

There was a write-up by someone about how everybody hate Monopoly because it
drags on, and few people fully understand that the reason it drags on is
because of house rules like Free Parking, immunities and the like.

I hated playing the board game as a child, but the console Monopoly games can
have some strategy applied to them that have immediate payoffs.

------
benologist
No, Facebook did. And they did it with crusty old PHP which pretty much proves
the platform isn't going to make or break your business.

Finding _good_ talent that's experienced with huge scale sites is not going to
be easy regardless of language. It's not like MySpace could have been RoR and
suddenly everything would have been simple, at their prime they were doing a
ridiculous amount of traffic that only a handful of sites ever had
experienced. There were probably 0 people experienced with PHP at Facebook's
level, they all had to learn as they go and what they learned was they picked
the wrong language so they created HipHop, a hack to overcome PHP and probably
hundreds of others that help them scale better.

~~~
gcr
Facebook didn't do it with "crusty old PHP;" rather, they had to re-build
their stack completely from scratch to keep up. See HipHop, their homegrown
PHP-to-C compiler <https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki/> and
Cassandra, their own custom database system <http://cassandra.apache.org/>

If they stuck with crusty old PHP, I have no doubt they would never be able to
manage the load.

~~~
benologist
Back when MySpace actually mattered I don't think they had HipHop, Cassandra
etc.

~~~
nikcub
HipHop went live on FB last year. It didn't even go live everywhere at once.

For some reason ppl think Mark created it on the 3rd day

~~~
gcr
It would be interesting to see how much load HipHop alleviated. I assumed it
helped, but how much?

~~~
nikcub
apparently it allowed them to not buy 70% of new servers at a time when they
were growing crazy

------
mikeryan
Its funny I don't know (can't think of one) of a high traffic site that "died"
due to technical failures (particularly scaling failures). Twitter had massive
problems during its growth phase, Reddit has had similar problems. Does anyone
have an example of a site that got "killed" by technical issues? I'm really
curious.

Bad products tend to die or get replaced by superior offerings. Thats the
nature of business.

Not being able to innovate rapidly because of technical lock in is the only
way these types of issues can "kill" a site. But its very hard to quantify
these types of issues. Between this article and Kevin Rose's statements about
hiring B&C level programming talent it seems like a lot of engineers are
getting tossed under buses, for poor management decisions.

~~~
chaz
Friendster:

[http://highscalability.com/blog/2007/11/13/friendster-
lost-l...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2007/11/13/friendster-lost-lead-
because-of-a-failure-to-scale.html)

 _VB: Can you tell me a bit about what you learned in your time at
Friendster?_

JS: For me, it basically came down to failed execution on the technology side
— we had millions of Friendster members begging us to get the site working
faster so they could log in and spend hours social networking with their
friends. I remember coming in to the office for months reading thousands of
customer service emails telling us that if we didn’t get our site working
better soon, they’d be ‘forced to join’ a new social networking site that had
just launched called MySpace…the rest is history. To be fair to Friendster’s
technology team at the time, they were on the forefront of many new scaling
and database issues that web sites simply hadn’t had to deal with prior to
Friendster. As is often the case, the early pioneer made critical mistakes
that enabled later entrants to the market, MySpace, Facebook & Bebo to learn
and excel. As a postscript to the story, it’s interesting to note that Kent
Lindstrom (CEO of Friendster) and the rest of the team have done an
outstanding job righting that ship.

~~~
lallysingh
To be fair to the rest of the industry, a single glance at the front page
shows size of the _TRANSITIVE_ _CLOSURE_ of your social network.

Why would you do that?

This is bread & butter algorithm analysis. Don't put O(n^2) analyses on your
most-loaded page.

~~~
aamar
I have heard from insiders that the founder viewed this feature--the count of
people 3 degrees away--as the central embodiment of the magic of Friendster,
an absolute must-have. I.e. people added friends in great part in order to
feel more connected to 100ks of people.

Others in the company begged to at least back it down to a count of people 2
degrees away; but the founder insisted that the magic was the 3-degree
version. So instead the company pursued technical strategies to speed up the
3-degree count; don't know what those were precisely, but it seems that they
were not pursued as zealously as they could be (due to VoIP, etc.
distractions).

My understanding, by the way, is that the network size was computed on page-
load until surprisingly very late, due to the perceived need for real-time.
Even after it was cached, it was still computationally expensive, as your
numbers were computed (roughly) every time your 3-degree network added a link.

In retrospect, A/B testing could have been used to test the executive vision.
So although my first reaction upon hearing this story (years ago) was: "that's
big-O insanity," now I think that it's just as much a story about willingness
to subject vision to empirical data and performing clinical cost/benefit
analysis (when appropriate).

------
marcc
MySpace wasn't always .NET. It was ColdFusion before .NET v2 came out. Not
that ColdFusion would have made any difference.

That said, I'd argue that no, Microsoft did not kill MySpace. Generalizations
like this are wrong. There are many more .NET enterprise developers out there
then there are Ruby or Node or Python. With quantity comes a varying degree of
ability. MySpace killed themselves by lowering their standards to the easy-to-
find .NET developer instead of setting the bar higher. Once you lower the
standard by which you hire developers, it's a cycle. The new guys will lower
the standard a little more to hire the next set, etc.

The lesson to be learned here is if you can't find a good developer, don't
blame the technology stack you've selected, blame your recruiter. Find the
person you want, they are out there.

------
kenjackson
Scoble's thesis seems way off. The problem with MySpace wasn't the technology,
or even the site. It was the users of the site. It became a place that people
didn't want to be associated with, while Facebook became that place. If
MySpace instantly could flip a switch and turn into Facebook (codewise) hardly
anything would have changed.

MySpace's problem IMO wasn't technical at all. They built a service that
focused on users most likely to move, and repelled those most likely to stick
with a platform.

~~~
tyree732
Another case of technical people assuming all business failures are technology
related. Just like Digg failed because of NoSQL even though Reddit is
frequently down due to technical issues.

------
strlen
Platform fetishism[1] and attempts to throw developers under the bus[2] aside,
the comment from Nick Kwiatkowski states a much better reason: developers
weren't empowered do their jobs.

The comments state that there was no staging or test environment, no ability
to roll back releases, refactoring was a dirty word (engineers _wanted_ to
refactor, but couldn't), principal on technical debt was never paid (only the
interest in terms of hacks to make the site scale-- again, product
organization prioritized new features).

The rest: location, technology choice aren't sufficient to "kill" a company:
there are successful companies in LA, there are successful and agile companies
using Microsoft stack (where appropriate-- see Loopt and
StackOverflow/FogCreek as examples of companies using both FOSS and .NET). On
the other hand, they're not optimal either: they aren't what engineers would
choose themselves most of the time.

This indicates that the technology and location choice aren't the cause,
they're symptoms of company management that doesn't understand building non-
trivial Internet applications (what the optimal technology stack for one is;
where, when and how to hire developers to build one) and yet maintains
authority to make all technical decisions. Contrast this with Facebook, Google
et al-- where every process (from corporate IT to production operations to HR
and recruiting) is designed with needs of the engineering organization in
mind: "Want two 24" monitors? No problem. Want Linux on your laptop? No
problem. Want ssh access to production? No problem. Want to fly in a candidate
to interview? No problem."

[1] I personally wouldn't touch Windows with a sixty foot pole, but speaking
objectively C# >3.0 and (especially) F# are great languages.

[2] "They weren't talented": having interacted with some ex-MySpace engineers,
this just isn't -- at least universally -- true. Indeed, here's a secret to
hiring in an early (Facebook in 2005) startup: seek out great developers who
work for crappy companies, people who have joined "safe bet, resume brand"
companies like (post ~2003) Google aren't likely to join you until you've
already become a "safe bet, resume brand" company (Facebook in 2008-Present).

~~~
chollida1
> Contrast this with Facebook, Google et al-- where every process (from
> corporate IT to production operations to HR and recruiting) is designed with
> needs of the engineering organization in mind:

Completely agree.

> Want ssh access to production? No problem.

This makes me a little uneasy, I'm not sure everyone should have ssh access to
the production server.

~~~
strlen
> This makes me a little uneasy, I'm not sure everyone should have ssh access
> to the production server.

Every _developer_ should. No question about it. Sudo should given on an is-
needed basis, but ultimately, as a developer I can screw up a lot more by
simply writing bad code.

Simple philosophy: you build the software, you should be involved in running
it (including carrying a pager). Amazon's CTO agrees:
<http://twitter.com/#!/Werner/status/50957550908223490>

~~~
chollida1
> Every _developer_ should. No question about it. Sudo should given on an is-
> needed basis, but ultimately, as a developer I can screw up a lot more by
> simply writing bad code.

Fair enough.

This, more nuanced point, I agree with.

------
Terretta
If a headline ends with a ?, the answer is generally "No."

~~~
technomancy
Indeed: [http://www.smbc-
comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2075#c...](http://www.smbc-
comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2075#comic)

------
n_are_q
I worked at MySpace, specifically the middle tier where these technical issues
supposedly existed (scalability), although I also worked on a number of user
and non-user facing projects during my time there. You may consider me biased
because of that, but I'd say I also have a pretty good view into the issue.
The reason for MySpace's downfall is crystal clear to anyone who worked at the
company and cared to look around and make sense of what was happening - it was
catastrophic lack of leadership and vision in management and product,
paralyzing political infighting, and general lack of competence at the top
levels of the company's management. The people making the decisions would
change their mind and requirements constantly because of this. There were
numerous entire features that were simply not launched and abandoned AFTER
they were completed because the management couldn't agree on how they wanted
to "position them" (and they were great features). The top management level
was in a constant state of political infighting, and that most likely came
from fox and the way they ran shit. There was no one to judge and reward
competence at that level, it was simply about who could cover their ass better
or come out looking better. MySpace was huge, and everyone just wanted a piece
of the pie.

One of the issues that stemmed from this was lack of respect for technology in
the sense that no one at the higher levels saw the company as a technology
company. They saw it as an entertainment or media company. That created the
cultural problems on down that eventually contributed to bad products and
shoddy implementation.

Now, the core technical part of the organization was actually extremely
competent. MySpace was pushing more traffic than Google at one point in its
heyday, and the site scaled just fine then. That wasn't an accident, I have
worked with some of the smartest people in the industry there. But because
tech wasn't the point for executives, those people were tightly controlled by
non-technical management, and so products suffered.

MySpace could (and still can) scale anything, to say that they had a scaling
problems by the time they got to their peak is complete gibberish. Over the
years they have developed a very mature technology stack. No one knows about
it because it's entirely proprietary. The problem was management and product
that was basically... incompetent, and lacked anyone at the proper levels who
would care to see and fix it.

EDIT: Some typos and missed words. I'm sure still missed some.

~~~
kragen
The original article mentions you didn't have version control or staging
servers. You didn't mention that claim. Is it true?

~~~
n_are_q
That's definitely false. We've had Microsoft's TFS as the source control
system when I started working there about 4-5 years ago (I no longer work at
ms). We also had two levels of stage servers, several for the dev code branch,
and a couple for the prod branch. Eventually each team had their own set of
stage servers. Stage servers were crucial since some parts of the
infrastructure were not testable in dev, so to say we didn't have any is to
not be at all familiar with ms's development setup.

BTW, I'm not normally this animated with my comments, but the article was so
full of such baseless conjecture I as truly appalled. I actually had a good
deal respect for Scoble prior to reading that. MS had a ton of problems, but
it definitely had a number of great people working on technology and doing a
pretty good job at it - otherwise we would have been friendster.

------
akmiller
Am I the only who thinks a large reason why MySpace lost to Facebook was
design?

MySpace just gave way to much flexibility to the users to modify the look and
feel of their pages that it just got way to busy and very difficult to look
at.

In some respects I think it was MySpace's business proposition to allow users
to create their own personal spaces on the web easily, whereas, Facebook's
goal was more to connect you to your friends. In that sense MySpace followed
through, although that follow through seemed to lead to their demise!

~~~
colomon
I logged into MySpace the other day for the first time in quite a while. And
wow, it's butt-ugly, hard to navigate around, and within ten minutes of
logging in I had eight MySpace-based spam e-mails sitting in my account.

In short, it's wildly less-pleasant to use than Facebook.

------
nobody_nowhere
Holy mother of god, no change management, staging or testing servers? On a
site that big?

Appalling, if true. (Not that good technology and process would have made the
product suck much less.)

------
calloc
Having read the article, as well as Scoble article linked I would have to
disagree that it was the Microsoft stack. There was just not enough investment
in their programmers. I work at a small startup where money is rather tight
while we raise funding and attempt to get contracts in, yet us developers get
what we need. Every developer has at least two screens (be it a laptop and a
large LCD, or a desktop with two the same monitors). We can ask for new
staging servers, we can ask for more memory, we can set up our own
infrastructure, and we can make technical decisions.

Once you start taking away the ability of devs to think for themselves or feel
comfortable doing work it makes it harder to be motivated to come into work
and fix the issues, and if management isn't listening to the complaints about
the need to re-factor then what is the point? Adding hack onto hack gets
boring pretty damn fast.

MySpace also lost in that they really didn't have a direction of where they
were going (at least that is what it looks like looking in). Blogs, music,
status updates, what was it supposed to be? And it didn't help that all over
their web properties they didn't have a consistent look and feel because they
allowed everyone and their mother to skin their profile page how they saw fit
leaving it a disjointed mess that just made me hate the site more.

------
chrito
(former MySpace and former .NET team @MSFT) Let's just say the Microsoft stack
probably didn't kill the beast… ASP.NET certainly didn't help though.

It's too bad that all the tech built around .NET will be lost to the annals of
MySpace, MSFT should acquire the company just to open source the whole thing
for the benefit of .NET.

Regardless, it's fair to say starting a company on "the Microsoft Stack" today
would reflect questionable judgement. Are there any recent ex-MSFT founders on
it?

~~~
nrkn
Try telling Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood that.

------
rosenjon
The technology never kills the business; it's ALWAYS the people. However, I
think this points out the extreme importance of getting good people who make
good technology choices.

MSFT products are not inherently evil; they have some advantages for some
types of projects. But a proprietary closed source stack always puts you at a
disadvantage.

Worst case scenario with open source, you go patch what's holding you back in
the open source. With bugs in MSFT products, you are at the mercy of MSFT to
prioritize your issue. If you are a big enough fish, then they will pay
attention. Otherwise, good luck.

I don't understand why anyone would willingly tie themselves to the Microsoft
web dev stack as a startup. Even if you don't have to pay upfront, you will
pay dearly in the future when you go to scale. At one startup I worked for we
were hamstrung by not being able to afford the upgrade to Enterprise SQL
Server, for example. So our data replication was tedious, time consuming and
prone to failure.

------
desigooner
In my opinion, some of it also had to do with inconsistent and ugly hacky
Myspace user experience.

White / Yellow / Green / Red fonts on black backgrounds with animated gifs +
glitter and broken plugins will be the response to the question "What comes to
your mind when you think of Myspace UI experience?"

In comparison, the facebook experience was a lot more fresh, clean and
unified.

~~~
joblessjunkie
Completely agreed.

It was downright embarrassing to have a profile page on MySpace. Unless you
wanted to spend an entire weekend customizing your page, it was going to look
like a banner ad factory had exploded on your profile. I'm a web professional
-- I can't have that as my public image.

Not only did MySpace look like an amateur web site from 1998, it was
completely confusing to operate. What checkbox do I click on which page to
turn off the flashing purple?

MySpace just had an inferior product, plain and simple.

------
thematt
Twitter had scalability problems and they were on RoR, but it got solved.
Scaling to those levels is always going to uncover problems in your
architecture. What mattered was the way MySpace chose to execute, not the
technology they did it with.

~~~
jcromartie
It got solved by moving off of RoR...

~~~
mnutt
By moving the part that wasn't scaling off rails. From what I understand they
had a giant monolithic rails app which just couldn't scale after a point. They
moved to a services-based approach, with a rails frontend talking to scala
services.

------
sajidnizami
Scalability is relatively new hiccup; given the fact that only in past few
years users have swarmed the internet. Sites never expected that and
developers weren't prepared. They learned mostly by trail and error and
reading case studies and then figured out what to do. You would find
inexperienced PHP devs who don't know scaling just like you would find .Net
devs.

I think the article has the right notions. Stack doesn't matter, a team of
highly motivated devs who can milk the technology involved is more important.

------
lemmsjid
As someone who was fairly intimately involved in the entire evolution of the
MySpace stack, I'm dumbfounded at the number of inaccuracies in this article
(actually, it's hard to call them inaccuracies so much as an exercise in "I'm
going to write an article based on some stuff I heard from disgruntled
people."). I developed in non-Microsoft technologies before and after MySpace,
and I can tell you that, like all technologies, the Microsoft web stack has
strengths and weaknesses. Performance was a strength, non-terseness of the
code was a weakness. Modularity was a strength. Etc. Have any of you
encountered a technology where, as much as you like it, you can't rattle off a
bunch of problems and things that could be done better?

The web tier has very little to do with scalability (don't get me wrong, it
has a lot to do with cost, just not scalability, except in subtler ways like
database connection pooling)--it's all about the data. When MySpace hit its
exponential growth curve, there were few solutions, OSS or non OSS for scaling
a Web 2.0 stype company (heavy reads, heavy writes, large amount of hot data
exceeding memory of commodity caching hardware, which was 32 bit at the time,
with extraordinarily expensive memory). No hadoop, no redis, memcached was
just getting released and had extant issues. It's funny because today people
ask me, "Why didn't you use, Technology X?" and I answer, "Well, it hadn't
been conceived of then :)".

At the time, the only places that had grown to that scale were places like
Yahoo, Google, EBay, Amazon, etc., and because they were on proprietary
stacks, we read as many white papers as we could and went to as many get-
togethers as we could to glean information. In the end, we wrote a distributed
data tier, messaging system, etc. that handled a huge amount of load across
multiple data centers. We partitioned the databases and wrote an etl tier to
ship data from point A to point B and target the indices to the required
workload. All of this was done under a massive load of hundreds of thousands
of hits per second, most of which required access to many-to-many data
structures. Many startups we worked with, Silicon Valley or not Silicon
Valley, could not imagine scaling their stuff to that load--many vendors of
data systems required many patches to their stuff before we could use it (if
at all).

Times have changed--imagining scaling to MySpace's initial load is much easier
now (almost pat). Key partitioned database tier, distributed asynchronous
queues, big 64-bit servers for chat session, etc. But then you factor in that
the system never goes offline--you need constant 24 hour access. When the
whole system goes down, you lose a huge amount of money, as your database
cache is gone, your middle tier cache is gone, etc. That's where the
operations story comes in, wherein I could devote another bunch of paragraphs
to the systems for monitoring, debugging, and imaging servers.

Of course there's the data story and the web code story. MySpace was an
extraordinarily difficult platform to evolve on the web side. Part of that was
a fragmentation of the user experience across the site, and a huge part of
that was user-provided HTML. It was very difficult to do things without
breaking peoples' experiences in subtle or not subtle ways. A lot of profile
themes had images layed on top of images, with CSS that read, "table table
table table...". Try changing the experience when you had to deal with
millions of html variations. In that respect, we dug our own grave when it
came to flexibility :).

Don't get me wrong, there were more flaws to the system than I can count.
There was always something to do. But as someone who enjoys spending time on
the Microsoft and OSS stacks, I can tell you it wasn't MS tech that was the
problem, nor was it a lack of engineering talent. I am amazed and humbled at
the quality of the people I worked next to to build out those systems.

~~~
erraggy
To keep this comment in context to those whom have reached this comment on its
own...

Article being discussed: [http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/3/25/did-the-
microsoft-...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/3/25/did-the-microsoft-
stack-kill-myspace.html)

HackerNews Link this is a comment from:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2369343>

I have no idea why HackerNews has no context links built-in to their comment
pages. O_o

~~~
erraggy
duh on my part. there is a link named "parent" following the permalink at the
top. Sorry...

------
petervandijck
If the MS stack killed MySpace, then PHP made Facebook?

------
mhewett
I'm not sure these technology-based analyses are correct. I had four teenagers
at the time and they all switched from MySpace to Facebook because the MySpace
pages got cluttered with glaring ads. The Facebook layout was cleaner and had
no ads (at the time). There was no problem with site speed.

------
rbanffy
I may be incinerated for saying this, but maybe stupid decisions are a symptom
of the incompetence that doomed MySpace to failure.

Let the big karma fire begin.

edit: somewhere else someone mentioned they used Cold Fusion. I consider that
another stupid decision. But at least they were migrating out of it.

------
mwsherman
It's nice, in a sense, to allow people to out themselves as mistaking
technology for culture. You can write slow code, and make bad choices, on any
platform.

My colleagues at Stack Overflow work faster and produce more -- at obsessively
fast web scale -- than any team I have observed. I also see talented people
struggle to produce a viable site using (say) Ruby on Rails.

Technology correlation? None. The correlation is in discipline, understanding
the tools, foresight, priorities, management...

Think of it this way...how often have you seen a headline on HN bring a site
to its knees? Fair guess that many of them are on "scalable" technologies.

------
paul9290
For me the UX killed it. Allowing any user to design their myspace page was a
bad decision. It was so annoying to find the information that is most
important in a social network on many of my friends and general user's pages,
as many just add crap on top of crap. Also, the terrible opening a MySpace
page and immediately hearing a song or piece of music and madly scrolling down
the page to find where to stop the awful sound. Most of the time I would just
close the window in disgust.

------
ry0ohki
The theme of the other comments on this thread seem to be ".NET? newbs!" or
"Facebook worked even though they used PHP!". Keep in mind that at the time
MySpace and Facebook were created, .NET was by far the best option out there
for a scalable framework, they converted their Cold Fusion infrastructure over
to it. It also may be hard for the Rails kids to believe, but PHP was the
Rails of that time.

------
jshen
I think it's simple. If you're business requires scaling at this level you
need to have really good engineers and they need to have a lot of say in how
things are done. I've worked with a number of "product" people from myspace,
and they were definitely not doing 1 of these two, maybe both.

------
antihero
No, Myspace failed because it was a shithole filled with awful people that
nobody took seriously, and Facebook turned out to be relatively clean and
useful.

Don't blame technology for your failings. Facebook won because it had a first
name and second name field.

------
rburhum
Give me a break!!! Teenagers with animated gifs, a horrible taste for colors
and true angst along with Rupert Murdoch's old school leadership killed
myspace. Before you blame the stack, look at the content and lack of a proper
newsfeed. Ugh

------
MatthewPhillips
Facebook hasn't always been a good performing site. I remember up until
recently if you clicked on the "Info" tab on a person's page you'd get a
loading gif for 10-15 seconds.

Hearing a blogger that has no idea what he's talking about make such
generalizations as 1) There are no good c# developers and 2) There are no good
developers outside the bay area shouldn't bother me but it does.

------
chaostheory
I really doubt the MS stack had anything to do with it. I think it's more of
case of a combination of a different online social shift (from scrapbooking to
social circle behavior tracking) and resting on your laurels (e.g. refusing to
evolve before Facebook became dominant).

In their defence, what Facebook stumbled upon was really simple and yet very
non-obvious (at least initially).

------
teyc
Myspace was killed by backwards compatibility.

One key aspect of Myspace is how customizable it is. As any programmer can
tell you, this limits the ways features can be rolled out.

For example, you want to have a new layout? Too bad. It will break the users
customization.

You want to add a new button? Too bad. There is not a coherent place where you
can add it.

You want ajax? How will that break users layouts?

------
tybris
Stackoverflow doesn't seem to have many problems with it. Anyone who has done
any C# programming knows .Net is * embarrassingly fast* these days. It'll save
you a lot of "scaling" money.

What killed MySpace is poor management. It is one of those companies that
still don't get that good engineers are as precious as good lawyers.

------
YuriNiyazov
No, the fact that myspace looks ghetto killed it.

------
sapper2
I agree. That is why eBay is such a failure ;-)

------
ecaradec
\- step 1 : create rules that makes it near impossible to develop

\- step 2 : accuse the competency of developers to hide your own incompetency

\- step 3 : fail

------
neebz
interesting consider Twitter is down right now.

------
curiousfiddler
Did "Closed Source" development kill MySpace?

------
Michiel
tl;dr: No

~~~
rchauhan
I don't think its as much about the technology platform, as it is about
following good development practices, and having a leadership that understands
the value of following those practices. Good leadership can make poor
technology competitive while poor leadership can screw up a good technology
platform.

------
mkramlich
if it contributed it was a much smaller factor than it's ugly design and
skanky/teen vibe.

------
fleitz
MySpace didn't die because of the Microsoft stack, they died because their
users left for Facebook. I'd take the .NET stack over PHP any day of the week.
I certainly don't know of any company that was so screwed by the performance
of C# that they needed to create a C++ compiler for it. (HipHop compiler for
PHP) PHP programmers aren't exactly known for their brilliance.

Definitely not a problem to fix their deploy problems on the .NET stack, I've
put together automated deploys for Windows and with MSI they are a breeze.
Yes, it's going to take a week or two to get the hang of WIX but after that
the installer does all your dependency checks and you have a very repeatable
process. If you stamp your MSIs with the build number it's even very easy to
rollback.

This is just about the most monumentally stupid thing you can say, if you
really don't like C# there are a dozen other languages available (like Ruby
AND Python). If you're hiring people that can ONLY write code in one language
then that should be a sign that you're not hiring the right people to begin
with. They hired crap talent that happened to know C#

All this which stack scales best crap is cargo cult programming, you should
recognize it as such. Most startups die because they have no customers, not
because their servers are on fire from load.

------
gcb
now HN is just becoming /.

MS stack does not kill anyone. dumb management kills.

top level should be able to see the error and move, be it dumb layoffs or .net
codebase. it's not like myspace was rocket science.

------
georgieporgie
It's always been my understanding that spam is what killed MySpace. I'm sure
Facebook's long-closed membership system helped make it a somewhat more
manageable issue to deal with.

------
bonch
Yeah, uh, StackOverflow is written in ASP.NET.

