It all boils down to the fact that scalability of an organization often is harder than scalability of a web site. Yahoo just happens to be a very good example of that.
As hackers we tend to focus a lot on technical scalability issues. We love to work on things like NoSQL, the CAP-theroem, large scale caching and whatnot. But I think that the organization often becomes the bottleneck quicker than the web site. This is especially true now when we have services like Amazon AWS and GAE which helps us with the technical scalability issues.
So next time you work on that really cool memory optimization maybe you should ask yourself if you don't get better scalability as a whole if you focus your limited programming resources on features instead (so you don't have to hire that extra programmer to do that for you, since you work on your memory optimization).
As hackers we tend to focus a lot on technical scalability issues. We love to work on things like NoSQL, the CAP-theroem, large scale caching and whatnot. But I think that the organization often becomes the bottleneck quicker than the web site. This is especially true now when we have services like Amazon AWS and GAE which helps us with the technical scalability issues.
So next time you work on that really cool memory optimization maybe you should ask yourself if you don't get better scalability as a whole if you focus your limited programming resources on features instead (so you don't have to hire that extra programmer to do that for you, since you work on your memory optimization).