Did I Make a Mistake Selling Del.icio.us to Yahoo?:

Once we were acquired, Yahoo helped us on the tech side, but not as much as it said it would. I think this is common for acquisitions. Before you’re acquired, you’re an important visionary. Afterward, you’re a crazy person who just wants to burn money.

Any decision was an endless discussion. I remember once, we had to present to a senior vice-president. We had a 105-slide deck prepared, and we didn’t get past the second slide because they ratholed about one fucking slide. It was a miserable environment.

It took a year for reality to set in. If you wanted to get hardware, you went to the “hardware request committee” with your proposal. They assumed that engineers liked spending money for no reason, so you’d have to go back and present again in two weeks. So there’s a month gone.

As an aside, I had no idea that the guy who created del.icio.us had previously created and run Memepool. I was never much of a del.icio.us user, but Memepool was one of my daily stops online at the tail end of 1990s and very early 2000s.

Specific to the quotes text above, though, I assume I am supposed to be outraged as I read those paragraphs, but it sounds like life in basically any medium to large organization. Schactman outright states earlier in the piece that his site was constantly broken and going down all the time; all the process and oversight he laments here is how you avoid that state.