MySpace 为什么会失败？

2011-03-28 10:02

[lessons, myspace]

前些年 Myspace 是社会网络的王者，在2005年7月由News Corp以 $580 million 收购。但从此之后，MySpace 停止了增长，用户流失飞快，在2010年5月时只有109 million用户了，比去年下降13%。

LeWeb采访了MySpace CEO Mike Jones，开场白：
主持人：MySpace最近有一些前途问题，我听说the MySpace “plane” that’s in a death spiral has increased its velocity，你在reburn the engine,... try to save the plane from hit ground.
...
What's like you trying to make change the company signification the world from hit the ground?

在这儿说到：
Workers inside MySpace tell me that this infrastructure, which they say has “hundreds of hacks to make it scale that no one wants to touch” is hamstringing their ability to really compete.

They answered with the cameras off: they can’t change their technology to really make new features work or make dramatically new experiences like the one that Aweditorium brought to the iPad. And now that they have laid off a lot of people morale is down and hiring is very tough for them, they tell me.

This bet on Los Angeles doomed MySpace when Facebook came along. Facebook has hired tons of talent from Google and other companies. This expertise helped Facebook not only keep up with scale, but add new features. Just today the QA team at Facebook shipped a cool new feature.

n Silicon Valley company managers, investors, and others have noticed these two things and are actively betting against both. This will make it tough for Microsoft to get its cloud computing strategy to work and will be tough for tech companies (and money) to locate in Los Angeles. 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.
I remember back when I worked at Microsoft that folks in the evangelism department bragged that they got MySpace to switch to Microsoft technologies like ASP.NET (MySpace used to be on ColdFusion which was an even worse technology bet and was creaking all over the place). Facebook, meanwhile, had made bets on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and that let them hire quicker and find people who knew how to scale that stuff up big time.
Interesting lessons to watch. What decisions has your company made to accelerate innovation or doom it?

这么对比，答案已经很清楚了。成功的技术和架构固然有价值，我以为失败的教训更有意义一些。
还有 MySpace CEO Mike 的坦诚令的我震惊无以复加。