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Comment by BlueAThrow | Hacker News Reader

I worked for AOL, who Verizon recently merged with Yahoo . It was inevitable they destroyed the startups . Yahoo processes made us look lean in comparison, and we were another old web 1.0 company . The first thing they make you do is port to their tech stack and so much time is spent on that process and approvals from central teams that it's a wonder anything gets done . They've got their own package manager, own internal ec2 clone, own build system, own Linux distro, own deploy system, and if any of those things were good it might make sense, but they're mid-2000s tech in quality .

Flickr disappeared for a crucial year post merger, and apparently they were porting to Yahoo's internal account system: https://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost... . At least that produced some user facing unification compared to some of the tasks we had . The attitude has not improved since .

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> but they're mid-2000s tech in quality .

This was the most disappointing part of being acquired. It was quite a wake-up call to realize that the culture inside Yahoo actually believed that their tech stack was good and competitive and that they were as innovative as Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon.

Nope. Yahoo obviously had a bunch of really clever people working there up until the year 2000, and they had to build a lot of things that didn't exist back then, because they were the first internet behemoth. But then all of those really clever people quit, and the company was left trying to steward the existing systems, while not having enough brainpower to create successor systems. So they were stuck, and a myopic "we're hot shit!" culture developed.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world went on, and "Yahoo scale" just aren't very impressive numbers anymore, and their 2000's tech stacks are just horribly overly complex solutions.

> They've got their own package manager, own internal ec2 clone, own build system, own Linux distro, own deploy system

This exactly describes the current cadre of internet giants as well, and it does seem nuts, but it's important to realize why this happens. For one thing, these systems were often developed and made to run at scale well before their better known brethren appeared. Sometimes those better known brethren eventually surpass the internal tools. Sometimes they never do.

> The first thing they make you do is port to their tech stack

There's no simple answer to whether this is a good idea. Switching costs are a real thing. Even if what you're switching to is better, that superiority has to outweigh the cost of the transition itself. There's a cost to the parent company switching, and there's a cost to the acquiree switching. There's also a cost of running a bazillion different software stacks on ten kinds of hardware and operating systems, as I know AOL did in those days. Maybe that's part of the reason they stopped being a viable standalone company. The most successful post-acquisition tech merges I've seen have been very deliberate about the costs and benefits of changing each part, not adopting blanket "always" or "never" rules.

Honestly, it's no different anywhere. BigCorp, no matter the quality, will acquire in the hopes of getting the 'special sauce' that comes with the startup but then proceeds to either force a rewrite, or poach all the people off, kill the product, or some other means of demotivating all people involved.

Are you in dialup internet services group? I heard AOL no longer sending dialer installer floppies.

I worked at aol and if yahoo’s stuff was worse I can’t imagine how bad it was.

> , own internal ec2 clone,

Are you talking about openstack/openhouse, or something else?

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