thanks to the wonderful world of blogging, i bring to you not one but two great bits of commentary on google’s recent acquisition of the deja’s usenet archives. first, monstro’s perplexed as to why google specifically decided not to adopt deja’s software to archive and manage usenet postings:

“…deja could get a message from post to archive in under 20 seconds; google currently does it in, um, 36 hours. i watched several deja engineers optimize that down to 20 seconds — it took them almost 2 years to get it that fast. is google going to be willing to invest that much time and energy, for something that isn’t even their core product? what about all the time deja put into spam protection? gone. posting interface? gone. five years of bookmarks, all over the world’s browsers and web sites? gone, and without any good way to restore or redirect them, ever. email services? gone. personalization software, saved groups, tracked threads? all gone.”

glenn thinks the sour grapes are a bit, er, sour [note, glenn is not commenting directly on the previous quote, but obviously he is commenting on it’s intent] :

“How much did you pay to Deja.com for this access that saves you all these hours? Nothing, you say? How strange, then, that their business model didn’t lead to profitability or even survival. How strange, also, that Google wouldn’t want to incorporate and support the codebase of a company that couldn’t turn these resources into profit. The expectation of free stuff is starting to decline, but this guy’s gut reaction reveals how much we’ve been lulled into it.”

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