dmose

My 2 cents:

Scott Gu, Silverlight, Mesh, MVC, the DLR - if MS can get wide developer adoption (I don't see any reason why they won't..all are quite compelling technologies) they will still be a force to be reckon with.

MS's problem is they are battling on soo many fronts - it's all about market share these days since the web game is moving towards a commodity play now and will be with the "cloud" services in the next few years.

What will happen is the classic coke vs pepsi, molson vs labatt battles we've seen - each just fighting for a few percantage of market share more (which translates into billions).

MS will never die, neither will IBM. They will continue to morph in new ways to increase shareholder value. Google will face the same challenges once the web advertising game slows down (which won't happen for at least 5 years IMO but there is still weakness).

Pick your poison, MS has a massive warchest of cash and is dying to spend it, they if anything, will be a major disruptor in the web game.

For me, it's pretty irrelevant because I'm a developer using a development knowledge base (MSDN) and have been for over a decade.

By your argument, HN is a fail too, yet you still click on the links.

Is there a viable market for this type of transportation? What happened to the concord? Lets not forget that was during a time when face-to-face was the only way to conduct business.

I have to hand it to them, knowing their oil wealth will eventually be depleated, building 'world wonders' such as this and the borge etc is a stroke of genius.

ENTJ ...amazed at how accurate the profile is

I second that.. also check ms research parallel task library, very cool stuff.

Here's a primer video

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=384229

route their favorite webmail client to a gay porn site (or straight, if they are gay..) through their hosts file

Excellent. With pipelining browsers this will speed things up even on the first hit

Blogs = the paparazzi Twitter = Britney Spears

They fester off each other. We're seeing a relatively new phenomenon in terms of coverage because people inherently love talking about nose dives. It wont' last...nobody talks about Friendster anymore.

The concept is cool but there still needs to be a point of reference. List the items under the main feed but perhaps lower their opacity. The user needs a feeling of progression, right now you get lost quite easily.

My 2 cents

It's doubt it's the language. Sure, you might get more efficient throughput with another framework or language..but I think the core problem lies in how many polling API connections they have. If their API is based on their core DB and not polling off a read only copy..they have a serious design flaw.

API conections, given their nature of having to do a security check each time should be based on a slave copy read-only db which is near-realtime, or potentially dirty read but who cares, its for their API. The security lookup should be cached since you rarely change API security accounts more than once..if you do, then you update the caches.. etc.

Granted I'm no expert, but it just sounds like they're overloading their DB with polling.

Their web pages for each user should be cached since they're not really hit as much as the api or rss

I dont' care what anyone says, having THAT many API connections constantly polling their DB along with what blane said about having to do authentication requests on every singel hit is taxing on any setup you can put together.

Oh and if they have a single table holding all their tweets...big issues there. I'd have a 26 "tweet" tables, one for each letter of the alphabet and my switch in the business layer. Then simply ship tweets older than a month, or patition based on that.

I don't understand how Xobni helps me? I installed it, I let it index my entire inbox... and .. what now? They should have taken the $20 million.

My opinion is if you can do what you love for a living, and get through the tough times, it's worth it. Trust me, there is a very small fraction of humanity that can actually "do what they love" and get through life... most of them are fighting for basic necessities that we take for granted.

the rest are just mindless zombies doing the 9-5 grind just trying to procreate.

Do what you love, worry about the rest later - it's all insignificant in the end, if you ever doubt that, just look up at the sky at night and realize the scale in which your perceived problems reside in.

Buying facebook would be a nice play, but it would be more like putting all your eggs into one basket as yahoo has more unique properties, including gems like flickr.

However, many people feel the future of search is through social networks, that is, seeing what my friends think/have bought before I go off on my own to try and figure things out is a pretty compelling reason to invest in a high growth social network.

Although I'm sure most MS engineers are sweating given facebook's platofrm.

It comes down to facebooks long term viability as a property on the net.