Sometimes I imagine it to be fun to lead a company like MySpace or Yahoo. Something, which was once enormous and is still quite big but declining.
Imagine all the cruft, which amassed over the years and you could clean up. Killing the loss making properties, applying best practices to the profitable ones. Improving efficiency of all kind of processes. Of course, you would have to be some kind of dictator immune to all the politics. But imagine the manpower you would have at hand. A small boat is more agile, but once a big ship steers in the right direction …
I once read or watched an interview from a MySpace person doing SEO, who stated, that they increased their visibility in the SERPs by some high amount (forgot the exact), just by actually using sensible title tags. I find these kind of inefficiencies/potentials in big organizations fascinating and off-putting at the same time.
You would not make the same relative increases of value you could do by starting a new company, but the risk would be much lower and absolute value created could be about the same.
My first web dev job was at a company in that situation. Trust me when I say that would never happen. By the time a company reaches the position myspace is in they usually have a penny pinching CEO that sees engineering as an expense. The entire codebase is usually put in maintenance mode until there is a drop in ad revenue. That's when the board and CEO create a panic project to refresh the site or introduce a new gimmick to fight the decline. That usually happens once a year or so.
Little thought is given to efficiency or refactoring because the decision makers don't care about that. Everything eventually becomes about quick quarterly "wins" so that executive management can earn their bonuses. In practice this means if you can't plan, complete and show the project directly increased revenue or decreased expenses for that quarter it won't become a priority.
That is the wonderful shortsighted world of a one product company in decline :-)
It's like owning your 10th or 15th laptop when many are on their 3rd to 6th.
The latter are happy with a new laptop, where as the former understand they just bought the death of their laptop the first day they take ownership of a new one.
Dealing with "cruft" is the future of any project with longevity.
Likewise, working on a codebase with a mindset of having a relationship with it for 5-10 years potentially is something there isn't enough thought conversation about clever architecture often outliving clever coding/tech/stacks.
> Likewise, working on a codebase with a mindset of having a relationship with it for 5-10 years potentially is something there isn't enough thought conversation about clever architecture often outliving clever coding/tech/stacks.
If you are referring to B2C startups, that is because users are far more valuable than code.
I wasn't referring to B2C Startups, but agree with you that users are far more valuable than code, but maintaining and refactoring said code can take away from delivering value to the users, and instead more attention can be spent on the the developers.
I imagine they would leave it alone as much as possible, because they aren't sure what's bringing in all the traffic. Wouldn't want to be another Digg.
tl;dr: Digg was the original reddit - much bigger, reddit was the underdog.
Digg did a redesign that was absolutely horrible and created a huge backlash. Because Digg did not create a backup/proper versioning, they couldn't go back to the old design, and people migrated to reddit. The rest, as they say, is history.
i actually do this kind of thing regularly: consulting big, mighty companies with huge websites (huge from a technical, content and traffic point of view) that are having a hard time or are falling behind.
and yes, it's awesome.
but god damn, it's hard - and at first very unthankful - work.
why? things are the way they are because they got the way they are.
i.e.: you wan't to do something something very sane, let's say you want that a link from the startpage links directly to another page instead of getting dragged over 16 (a real world example) redirects. oh yeah, and you have the full support by the CEO to do whatever is necessary.
now there are two possible scenarios:
a) the person / team who is responsible for the mess is still with the company. he/she will justify - with good, valid arguments - that each of these 16 redirects is necessary. this person has spent 10+ years to work with the company and was doing the best work he/she was able - under the circumstances (which were never easy) - to do. the reasoning of this person is flawless. he/she - the person which "owns" this technical part - will refuse to do it. threatens to leave the company if you do it - oh - and the CEO says that this person is "indispensable".
b) the person / team who was responsible for the mess is no longer with the company. nobody has a clue, nobody knows why it's in there and nobody knows what will happen. if you do it anyway a huge shitstorm will start where everybody is complaining about the "incompetent" consultant.
the easiest option is always not to do anything (also called "lets do something else"), but well - that's the losers way.
so what to do
I) always start with hard cold data (i.e.: perf stats, specs of how many redirect the different browsers follow, ..), because this is the best way to ->
II) get rid of personalities - technical owners are great during product development, are liability and burden during maintenance and restructuring.
III) make sure that everybody understands that things will get worse before they get better
IV) focus on execution (a.k.a. do it anway, no matter what)
V) be aware that - newly introduced - bugs that do not kill the company will not get fixed right away
VI) be aware that there will be major criticism - and a lot of pressure on the CEO
and well, this is only the process for the absolutely sane changes you want to introduce. lets imagine the process for stuff where there would be an actual need for discussion.
Couldn't those companies invest their money in a total new and fresh service/brand? We can agree that they're in fact declining, isn't it like "pulling up a car off a cliff"?
Imagine all the cruft, which amassed over the years and you could clean up. Killing the loss making properties, applying best practices to the profitable ones. Improving efficiency of all kind of processes. Of course, you would have to be some kind of dictator immune to all the politics. But imagine the manpower you would have at hand. A small boat is more agile, but once a big ship steers in the right direction …
I once read or watched an interview from a MySpace person doing SEO, who stated, that they increased their visibility in the SERPs by some high amount (forgot the exact), just by actually using sensible title tags. I find these kind of inefficiencies/potentials in big organizations fascinating and off-putting at the same time.
You would not make the same relative increases of value you could do by starting a new company, but the risk would be much lower and absolute value created could be about the same.