death of MySpace

There is an interesting article by scoble on the death of MySpace.

Scoble talked to MySpace insiders and they told him the two main reason of MySpace losing to facebook are:
1. Their bet on Microsoft technology doomed them for a variety of reasons.
2. Their bet on Los Angeles accentuated the problems with betting on Microsof

I believe there is also a third factor which is the influence of newscorp in the decision making process. .

I remember when Microsoft first bought hotmail and it was running well on unix and they alot of problems trying to get it to run on windows NT. Not surprisingly when they started to get it to work on Microsoft is in the same period as hotmail was significantly losing market share. The same theme happened when Facebook was forced to change from Coldfusion to Microsoft products. I love Microsoft products but reality in my experience UNIX based solutions can scale so much better then Microsoft products. Slower and limited tools will make it harder for MySpace developers not being able to compete with Facebook.

I have always argued its the people are the most important resource in an IT company and the factor of MySpace being based in Los Angeles so has much less talent base then in Sans Francisco. This is a valid point as a lot of recruitment is done by networks and people in the same area have higher chance of networking. Majority of Top Gun developers want to work in Silicon Valley with best tools in companies that expect to explode. So the thought of working with Microsoft .Net products for Top Gun developers is a also a negative for MySpace.

My kids used Bebo and that went downhill when AOL bought them and now my kids use Facebook. In 2005 Newscorp purchased MySpace. NewCorp then authorised the move from ColdFusion to Microsoft .Net. This is classic management/marketing decision without taking into consideration the core people related to product. i.e developers. Non IT management saying make it work and of course the IT people that want to keep their jobs say yes we can do it. I have done this before then its just a matter of managing their expectations. So for me the majority of the blame should be on NewCorp and once Facebook becomes corporatised I expect them to fall too.

MySpace has also lost over ten million users between January and February 2011, according to comScore. In February 2011, the Internet website had less than 63 million users, down from a previous total of approximately 73 million. In the same month.

So when will the death of MySpace occurring. In January 2011 News Corp. is considering a possible spinoff or sale of MySpace, a day after cutting almost half of the social-networking website’s workforce. Future is not looking good for MySpace