Doomsday Part I: Microsoft's Razorfish Apparently Dumps Microsoft Technology Amid Rumoured Sale of This Massive Microsoft Asset

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2009-02-19 18:31:33 UTC
Modified: 2009-02-19 18:35:36 UTC

More failing portions of Microsoft

MANY of Microsoft's business areas are not successful, but the few which are still profitable can possibly outweigh and compensate for some of the losses. In terms of financial indicators, Zune, MSN/Live and XBox have been total disasters. Windows Mobile too has been a serious failure, but Microsoft Office continues to bring home some bacon, sometimes owing to sheer corruption.

Some of Microsoft's layoffs over the past 4 months have been taking place in Razorfish [1, 2, 3, 4], which is its fairly large subsidiary. Razorfish was acquired by Microsoft along with aQuantive, a company that was based on GNU/Linux in its stack [1, 2, 3] and whose manager recently quit Microsoft.

According to this fresh report, Razorfish is moving to Rackspace, which is probably well known for its GNU/Linux-based hosting. Having glanced at the site's Netcraft report, it seems as though Razorfish got rid of Microsoft IIS and is now embracing Free/open source software, namely Apache.

HTTP headers:






w3m -dump_head http://www.razorfish.com/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:45:54 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: blank
Connection: close

No wonder that, according to Eric Engleman, "there's been persistent speculation that Microsoft is looking to unload the agency." This was said in a respectable and reliable publication some weeks ago, as well.

Netcraft suggests that the company's server is running Apache after many years with IIS, but it still seems to be running Windows as a platform (the server is case insensitive). What happened to Microsoft IIS? Is Microsoft preparing to toss another couple of thousand of employees by selling Razorfish away? ⬆

Comments

Roy Schestowitz

2009-02-19 22:20:14

More information here:

"Microsoft's Razorfish has chosen Rackspace to host the development of new Web sites and applications rather than wait for its parent company to release its own cloud-hosting platform Windows Azure."
twitter

2009-02-20 06:08:20

The OOXML was corrupt, but I don't think it has been successful and is not responsible for money Office makes for M$. That is largely the result of past corruption and innertia. Even the older M$ formats and non standards seem to be in retreat - with normal web forms or pdf being used to solicit text from people instead of buggy and unreliable Office formats. The rise of Google's ODF based office software is another blow and probably more common than OOXML. Even Steve Ballmer admitted Google Docs was a problem for M$. Overall, I think this is another battle that free software and real standards are winning.
nonsense

2009-02-20 23:48:58

This is nonsense. Why would anyone switch from IIS to Apache? First thing that comes to my mind is switching from ASP to PHP and running the site on a lamp stack instead of forcing iis to do something it wasn't meant to do. Makes perfect sense to me. This headline should read "Microsoft subsidiary runs site on lamp stack".
Roy Schestowitz

2009-02-21 00:09:04

It appears to be using Windows though.

Doomsday Part I: Microsoft's Razorfish Apparently Dumps Microsoft Technology Amid Rumoured Sale of This Massive Microsoft Asset

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