I wonder how much of that is overhead from maintaining legacy systems. It’s one thing to use modern tools to build out big distributed applications. It’s another to take something built in the 90s by someone who left the company a decade ago and scale that up to a hundred million users.

I bet they’ve got rooms full of old machines that used to run critical systems, and that they keep around because they’re the only documentation on how it works.

(At least it was that way when I worked at MapQuest back in the day.)