I am not impressed.

As a former employee of a large Internet company (the largest at the time, in fact) that used both Oracle and MySQL, I'm utterly puzzled by this. I can't think of why we should trust Oracle to do right by the users of MySQL--especially the non-paying users.

You see, for years Oracle worked agressively behind the scenes to discredit MySQL and tried hard to understand how their customers could ever consider using such a "toy" instead of their flagship product. In fact, it was so important to Oracle that they offered some very substantial discounts to customers who were using MySQL and Oracle. In some cases the discounts were so impressive that their motivation was clear: cut off the opportunity for MySQL to grow and spread in such organizations. (Remember what happened to Netscape when Microsoft gave away Internet Explorer for free?)

The funny thing is that it really didn't work. MySQL was already a fast moving train with lots of momentum. And it was still accelerating.

It was clear that Oracle saw MySQL as a threat to their business. When they eventually bought Innobase (the company that makes the InnoDB storage engine), many of us got more than a bit nervious. That put Oracle in a position of having a choke hold on the one componenet that was critical to MySQL's future success. They could have just shut down development entirely. But that may have made their motives a bit too clear.

Since then they've continued to develop InnoDB. However, the pace hasn't exactly been agressive and their openness around that has left me (and others) wondering what their longer term plans really are. The few tidbits we get seem to be overly vague. Could they have been throttling development of InnoDB? Or not providing the same resources that MySQL (and now Sun) would have? It's hard to say.

But here's the thing that continues to bug me...

Back a few years ago when Oracle dismissing MySQL in public while working hard against it in private, I realized that they were simply trying everything they could to protect their crowned jewels: public denials and classic FUD paired with hush-hugh backroom deals.

Nobody has managed to explain, in even a mildly convincing way, what has changed since then. Why should we suddenly trust Oracle? Their crowned jewels are still threatened by MySQL.

Convince me.

See Also: Monty's appeal is selfless!

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The Search deal with Microsoft was basically inevitable. You could see even two years ago how out-gunned Yahoo was compared to Google and to what Microsoft was rumored to be thinking of doing. Based on what I knew, Yahoo was spending less than 20% of the money on search that Google was and they were trying to do the same worth with about 1/10th the hardware and less mature infrastructure software. Meanwhile, the web kept growing and became more and more real-time.

It seems that Yahoo wants to sell Zimbra. I remember when that acquisition happened. I thought it was cool technology and would be great if we actually wanted to compete in the on-line "office suite" market (or whatever), but that never happened. Instead it remained as one of those "enterprise" products that Yahoo has a history of trying and failing at. Remember Yahoo's enterprise instant messaging product? FAIL.

Now comes news that Yahoo wants to sell Small Business which includes their web hosting and domain registration businesses. This makes good sense to me. While it's a business that I think has usually made money, it simply wasn't competitive in a day and age when you can get a full virtual machine, storage, and bandwidth from any number of vendors who aren't scared to offer good remote access (ssh anyone?) to the server: Slicehost, Rackspace, Server Beach, Amazon, and so many others. Yahoo's offering may have made sense back in the year 2000 or so when it really competed on price, but this is one of those race-to-the-bottom commodity business and has been for years.

People picking on Carol for selling some stock recently? Well that's just dumb. Yahoo is a public company and she really didn't sell that much.

I hope that Carol is able to trim the parts of Yahoo that no longer make sense and help bring some focus to the company. I really do. But to be honest, I've seen it before. Terry Semel tried to do something similar when he came on board. But that was a wandering effort that ultimate lacked focus and wasn't ambitious or forward-thinking enough.

Jerry and Sue tried this when Terry left, but I really think they were too "Yahoo" to transform Yahoo into what it needs to be.

I see how Carol is trying to be smart on the business side, but I'm not sure how Yahoo plans to wow its users. And coming from the Yahoo! Developer Network, I wonder if Yahoo will ever get serious about outside developers. Conferences and Hack Days are great, but I suspect they still haven't figured out how to offer buisness-class APIs (with an exchange of money and an SLA). Aside from YUI and Hadoop, can you really go beyond a prototype with this stuff?

It could simply be that I never really drank the YOS/YAP kool-aid and never will get it.

Oh, and what about those smaller startups? Should I start to worry that del.icio.us or Flickr is going to go away? What about Upcoming? When their founders start to worry, I feel like I should too. At least Flickr has a business model and appears to still be kicking some ass. MyBlogLog has all but died on the vine, right? Is there anyone left of the original team of 5 or 6 engineers still working on it? No, I think it fell victim to Yahoo's larger social strategy. FAIL.

I hope that Carol can be clear, focused, and agressive in re-shaping Yahoo. The half-measures attempted over the last few years simply haven't been enough and never will be.

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Aside from playing back photos in Picasa and various video files, we also stream music using Pandora or play from our library using WinAMP or Media Center. For streaming video, we'd been using Hulu a bit (which is Flash based) and Netflix (which is Silverlight).

Yesterday we tried out Hulu Desktop and attempted to watch the Glee pilot. Hulu desktop crashed on the first run after install (could be a Windows 7 issue) but then ran fine upon restarting it. But the video quality was low and quite jerky. It used a lot of CPU too. This made me wonder if it was really taking advange of the video capabilities of our system.

It was bad enough that we switched to watching the show using the browser-based streaming. Hitting the full-screen high quality version acually played better there and used less CPU. So the desktop application clearly needs some performance tuning.

I compare all of this with Netflix streaming which uses Silverlight and the difference is clear, even in 720p resolution we tend to keep our display set to. Microsoft has done a good job of tuning Silverlight for video. If I recally, they have very good H264 support built-in.

That said, I'm glad to see Hulu Desktop out. It makes a lot of sense to have an app that can be controlled via IR remote instead of the wireless keyboard we had been using.

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