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Whatever happened to Viaweb?
by orangethirty 13y ago
Whatever happened to Viaweb?
- Snail_Commando 13y agoIt was renamed and became the basis of Yahoo! Store.
- stonemetal 13y agoIt was also completely rewritten. It kind of boggles the mind. They didn't keep any of the branding or any of the code. What exactly did they buy? Users?
- smrtinsert 13y agoThat's exactly what they bought. These days you can clone a lot of sites that exist out there (HN or reddit are great examples) but you wont get anywhere without the community
- tlb 13y agoI rewrote some parts for scalability in the first couple years after the acquisition, and a lot was changed after I left. But I believe a lot of it is still there 15 years later. Perhaps a current maintainer could elaborate? Many codebases end up pretty different after 15 years. It doesn't mean the original codebase wasn't a useful starting point. It's lower risk to adapt and improve based on customer feedback than figure out, "what should a build-your-own e-commerce tool do?" in the first place.
- stonemetal 13y agoThanks for that, the little I had read about it gave me a much different impression of a complete rewrite to move away from lisp.
- orangethirty 13y agoWhat language was your re-write done in?
- tlb 13y agoAgain, there was no complete re-write. It remained a mix of Lisp, Perl5 and C++.
- orangethirty 13y agoCool, thanks for answering. I wonder how many languages Yahoo currently uses. Given how many acquisitions they have done over the years.
- chopsueyar 13y agoWho devised RTML?
- tlb 13y agopg.
- orangethirty 13y agoPaying users. That's something very valuable. The fact that is still running says a lot about the product.
- anandkulkarni 13y agoIt became Yahoo! Stores.
- orangethirty 13y agoAnd what happened to that?
- dangrossman 13y agoIt remains one of the largest hosts of online stores in the world, powering more of the top 500 internet retailers than any other hosted store platform.
- orangethirty 13y agoI did not know that. Cool. Thought Yahoo stores had somehow gone away.
- smackfu 13y agoObvious next question is exactly how many of the top 500 internet retailers use a hosted store platform...
- ttrreeww 13y agoNot many :)
- nissimk 13y agothis?: http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/ http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/
- tokenadult 13y agoAs pg once joked, Yahoo Stores still hosts pg's blog. (I presume that by that, Paul is referring to his paulgraham.com site, but I may be mistaken about which site he had in mind.)