
MySpace’s death spiral - gm
http://scobleizer.com/2011/03/24/myspaces-death-spiral-due-to-bets-on-los-angeles-and-microsoft/
======
ChuckMcM
I think the insight here for entrepreneurs is that 'web' is not 'enterprise'.
Microsoft has spent billions targeting 'enterprise' (to compete with the big
software players like SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Etc) which is structured and
deployed very differently than 'web' (where big users are Google, Facebook,
Etc.)

When I worked at NetApp we had customers in both sides of the world, what we
discovered was that the 'enterprise' guys often had a cadence, it went
something like grow, identify challenges, coast, upgrade, repeat. That cycle
was built around taking the latest release of 'big player' software,
qualifying it, then putting it into production, growing a bit, figuring out
where the problems were, talking with their vendor, waiting, getting a new
release and then repeating the cycle. But the cadence at 'web' players was
sporadic at best and often frenetic, feature request, test, iterate, feature,
iterate, test, coast, coast, coast, feature, feature, feature, test, coast,
Etc. As ideas struck the 'web' infrastructure folks they would would
immediately implement some sort of prototype or test case, then rapid fire
come up with features the infrastructure needed to support to maximize this
feature. But sometimes they would go long periods, months, where nothing would
change (in the infrastructure side, web pages, UX, etc sure but same servers
and storage assets).

What I learned from that was that while it was great to have some other
company own the burden of the 'base infrastructure' in terms of operational
expense (hey you don't need Linux hackers if your not changing stuff at that
level, so its a savings in staff etc etc) it imposes a hard limit on the
change derivative. What happens if you try to change faster than the
infrastructure can change, is that you end up hacking around the limits, and
that builds up technical scar tissue that over time slows your mobility still
further.

So bottom line, you can't continue to pivot faster than your infrastructure,
if you're hacking your way around the infrastructure to change, then your
ability to change will die by a thousand hacks. If you find your self thinking
you need to hack around your infrastructure, listen to that warning and start
planning for a more agile base to work from _now_ rather than when we're
struggling to keep an old system working while developing a completely new
one.

~~~
phlux
This is a fantastic comment, and advice that should be seen by everyone --
especially scrappy startups on YC that have aspirations to turn into said
dreaded enterprise.

There is a balance that one has to achieve between agility and stability - but
that balance, the agility and stability can all be compromised based on early
infrastructure choices.

Sadly, early infrastructure choices are 99% of the time predicated on
available budget.

Due to this, there is one infrastructure choice, policy really, that can be
made that will provide you with the best available path throughout the life of
your companies infrastructure: VIRTUALIZE EVERYTHING

I spend a lot of time in the weeds of infrastructure as I design the physical
cable-plant and data center environments that people shove all their stuff
into - I cannot virtualize physical cables - but I design the plants around
the idea of virtualization.

This means that you want to collapse your traffic to as fat a pipe as possible
as quickly as possible. Allowing you to run minimal physical cabling.

as you grow as a company, and you get to a point where your services will
transfer from hosted infrastructure to owned infrastructure maintain as much
virtualization as possible which will allow you to pivot easier higher in the
stack.

With virtualized storage now, the only thing you cant virtualize is your
actual transit.

It's funny how net diags now just look like a bunch of tiny clouds linked
together then simply to larger clouds.

------
m0nastic
Is the biggest takeaway from why Myspace cratered really that they migrated
their technology to a .NET stack?

That seems ridiculous to me.

The being in L.A. thing might be less ridiculous, but I also find it hard to
believe that there aren't boatloads of developers in L.A. who couldn't add
value to a social networking site.

The reasons that come to mind for why Facebook initially started to attract
users away from Myspace are that its profile pages didn't look like the
Trapper-Keeper of a 14 year old, and the fact that it had exclusivity from
being associated with Universities.

edit(I forgot this one as well): Also the shift from having to seek out your
friend's pages to having their updates show up on your main page seemed like a
big differentiator.

You can chalk the enhancements made to Facebook after that point to their
underlying technology, but I really don't think ASP.NET was responsible for
why Myspace sucked.

~~~
jordan0day
Agreed -- even the technology problems he mentioned seem to have a lot more to
do with MySpace's own architecture than the underlying platform.

That said, I think he could have better put it by saying he thought MySpace
needed _rock star_ developers, and that they had a harder time getting _rock
star_ .NET devs. I'm still not sure that's actually true, but at least it's a
little more reasonable.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure Facebook was already eating MySpace's lunch before
they even made the asp.net switch. Maybe not in pure numbers, but definitely
in momentum.

 _Edit:_ Not that I think MySpace needed _rock star_ developers, just my take
of what Scoble was trying to say.

------
akshat
I usually like what scoble writes, but this is such nonsense. Myspace would
like to believe that they were let down by Microsoft or LA, but the fact
remains that they were playing with marbles compared to Zuckerberg's chess.

They could have matched Facebook feature to feature and that too the very next
moment. I can guarantee that it would not have changed a thing. Google came
out with numerous social plays with better strategy, scale and speed without
much success.

Finally if Myspace could not change fast enough it cannot be attributed to the
platform. In hindi we have a saying, "naach na jaane aangan tedha"(calling the
floor crooked, when you don't know how to dance).

Silicon Valley might be awesome for its talent, but I would bet that there are
enough awesome developers in any metropolis to make any web company
successful. You need to be a place which needs to be able to attract such
people. Being in SV would not have changed a thing, as no good person would
have wanted to join Myspace.

------
billpaetzke
I'd say a startup based in LA and on MSFT makes life tougher, but not
impossible. Developers in LA are scattered and there's probably less of them
than SF. And there is less info and components out there to do complex stuff
in the MSFT stack. (I work at a MSFT-based startup in LA, so I speak from
experience).

At any rate, you can still make it work. Google has an office with developers
in Santa Monica (west LA). And StackExchange is a great example of making the
MSFT stack work.

By the way, any MySpacers here that got laid off or looking to jump ship?

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

------
sofuture
To suggest that MySpace couldn't have changed their product due to a
technology stack they moved to (I'm speculating a bit here) rather late in the
losing-out-to-Facebook is pretty silly.

Even if close to true, it would be their specific architecture, not the stack.

------
Lukeas14
You can try to blame Myspace's "death spiral" is due to their tech stack,
moving to L.A., but the root cause is their inability to innovate. It was
virtually the same site in 2010 as it was in 2002. Think of how many new
features Facebook has launched and relaunched in that time. There was a time
when many people enjoyed their custom designed profile pages. But then they
grew up and MySpace didn't.

------
83457
I attended a ColdFusion conference back in 2004-5 time frame where one of
their top guys was brought in to talk about their success with BlueDragon.NET
to allow them to run CFML on .NET as they transition to Microsoft's stack.
They talked about how they were posting dozens of revisions a day and things
would break regularly. He joked about how when the site went down a little
flash game would come up and people started asking for the site to go down
again so they could play the game.

Sounded like a mess and other developers in audience felt the same way. Then I
signed up and saw how bad it really was as half my searches resulted in errors
and the design sucked, among various other issues. Facebook was just awesome
in comparison. I think MySpace's death spiral can be almost completely
attributed to their lack of professionalism, for lack of a better word, from
the start and the only way to remedy would have been to start from scratch.

------
sriramk
Wow - weird that highscalability put up and edited version of my comment on
Scoble's blog.

I have a bunch of friends from MySpace and one common theme I do hear is that
they feel that a better architecture (not connected to the stack) would have
let them ship stuff quicker.

The interesting thing here from Nick Kwiatkowski's comment on that page is
MySpace did a lot of things you'd often see on advice posts here - like
"Rearchitecting/rewriting from the ground up is almost always a fool's
errand". It seems like there is a limit to technical debt you can endure. If
you rewrite too quickly, you'll be made fun of as the company which killed
their product by trying for a massive rewrite/re-engineering effort. Take too
long and somebody like FB gets to ship features very quickly and leap ahead of
you.

------
JonnieCache
_"It wasn’t lost on me that yesterday when I was at Y Combinator several of
the folks involved there bragged that Ashton Kutcher visited the headquarters
a few weeks ago."_

What on earth does this mean? I thought the ashton kutcher meme was simply
down to his meteoric popularity on twitter, but this implies that there is
something startup-specific about it.

~~~
curiousgeorge
He's an active angel investor in California. Also, he was hilarious in Dude,
Where's My Car.

