Yahoo Mail: Object Lesson in Failed Scalability?

Elsewhere I had begun a lengthly blog post detailing my often unsavory history of interactions with customer service at Yahoo! Mail.  A paying customer who intentionally accumulated considerable mail, increasingly that mail could not be searched or retrieved. The symptoms varied, so in the beginning it seemed to be a flaw rather than a design problem.  The example below was typical of the initial symptoms.

After several months of back and forth with level 1 and 2 support, I began to question the initial assessment of "bug."  During this time period, Yahoo developed a new, nicer interface.  There was good functionality in this new work, but my problems persisted.

I'll post more details here later as time permits (I'm in the middle of a tedious migration to escape all this), but it's become clear that Yahoo does not intend for its users to keep large quantities of mail online. Or perhaps its testing environment is insufficient.

Gmail?  Gmail is so far scaling nicely, though I have only a fifth as much mail there.

Question Software Maintenance? You bet.

A cover story in Information Week (January 26, 2009) poses the radical question, "What if I don't pay maintenance?" Or, at least, what if I go to a third party for software maintenance instead of the manufacturer? Oracle and SAP are moving to an annual maintenance fee of 22%. The software life cycle cost has been growing steadily since the "standard" rate of 18% was exceeded by some major players. What irks many who might otherwise be willing to pony up is that customers have little control over how the maintenance revenues are spent. Author Mary Hayes Weier suggests the alternatives include open source, SaaS, third party support, renegotiation, or moving to self-service maintenance. Whether any of these are feasible for your scenario is unclear, but it is clear that few companies offer much transparency about where your maintenance revenues are being spent -- though those same firms will be the first to make claims to Wall Street about how those revenues account for bottom line results.