15 thoughts on “Omens

  1. Eeep. Well, maybe you can transition to being a ‘softie then?

    Maybe it’ll just be one of those gloomy days, like a Ronald Dhal book, and once the weekend hit all will be well.

  2. Adiv — It could have been a raven, I sure as heck can’t tell them apart.

    Dru — I dunno. I asked my girlfriend, “So would you dump me if I became a Microsoft employee?” and without a pause she said, “Yes.”

    I think she was kidding.

  3. Right. I know some current and former Microsoft employees — and they’re very sharp people, and many of them enjoy working there quite a bit.

    As for whether this *particular* acquisition will work out from an Engineering standpoint… well that, as we sometimes say in the valley, is an “open question”.

    (Imagine me making really really vigorous air quotes around “open question.”)

  4. Assuming the deal does in fact go through, I should be fine. I’m buried deep in the platform and infrastructure group. You can cut and merge various teams any way you like… but it will take a very long time to pry Yahoo! loose from its core infrastructure.

    Or… I could be wrong. Steve Ballmer could decide on Day One to just take off and nuke the site from orbit. But I suspect that scenario will play out about as well as it did in the movie.

  5. Actually, I shouldn’t be so flip. If the infrastructure really is a dead end, I bet you could justify cutting writers a couple years before cutting engineers. 🙂

  6. There were some articles discussing savings due to moving to “common platforms.” One assumes this means moving away from Open Source products such as Apache on FreeBSD servers and moving towards IIS on you-know-what. I’m sure you’re right that it will take a long time to pry Yahoo! loose, but it may be the goal.

    Not that this discussion is particularly over any line, but surely you know about [dangers of blogging about work](http://dooce.com/about)?

  7. Yup, yup, common platforms. There has been a lot of yuk-yukking at work about this. “Oh sorry, I can’t make that meeting… I’ve got to go rewrite {Product X} in C#.” 🙂 Anyway, I’m sure that would be their goal, but it would be a huge undertaking.

    Heh, I remember Dooce. I’m not too concerned about the dangers of work blogging… I don’t *think* there’s anything here that’s offensive or gives away deep dark corporate secrets. If I start [posting stuff like this](http://dooce.com/archives/daily/02_04_2002.html), then you should worry about me being fired, and rightly so.

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