On the question of other large sites, I’m pretty sure that there are some big 100-million+ user sites using more “off the shelf” hardware and software: Hotmail certainly. I’m pretty sure eBay still runs on fairly stock stuff. I know that they have announced they are using Azure.

In addition, and closer to home for me, a lot of the large financial websites are running on Windows, Oracle, etc. Some of those sites have huge numbers of users. (Probably not the kinds of sites you were thinking of though.)

Definitely a very interesting topic no matter how this all shakes out.

Who else runs a read/write 24/7 cloud application at Google/Facebook/Amazon scale (hundreds of millions of users) using off-the-shelf hardware and software infrastructure? It’s not that no one else uses off-the-shelf products from multiple vendors, it’s that the companies that have been successful at the scale Apple appears to be shooting for have all invested heavily in their own custom infrastructure initiatives. Apple appears to be bucking that trend. But as I said on the podcast, Apple has bucked many other trends in the past and has come out on top. OTOH, Apple’s past online service efforts have not been stellar. We’ll see how things go with iCloud, but I think my point about the disparity between Apple and others with similar-scale online efforts is a valid one.

Vincent