My friends at FeedBurner surfaced today with a post titled Hello? Hellooooo? In it, they explain what they’ve been up to post-acquisition by Google. Two words – technical integration.
It’s hard. I’ve talked to Dick Costolo – FeedBurner’s CEO – a couple of times about it in general terms. They are basically rewriting FeedBurner to work on Google’s architecture. The leverage they get out of this is enormous, but they have to rewrite a bunch of stuff to get there.
The brilliant thing about the FeedBurner service is while there hasn’t been many new features since the Google acquisition, it’s continued to work flawlessly over the past few quarters. This is a testament to the quality of the service in the first place.
These days, whenever someone tells me that "scaling is no big deal" or "after that, we just need the money to scale things up", I just burst out laughing. The deep dark hole of post acquisition integration is often deep and dark. When it works, it can be a beautiful thing.