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.
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.