Life in Balance: Amit D. Chaudhary’s Blog
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This thought has been floating in the background of my mind for a few months and I could not pin it down. Till the following post I read by Dare, PM MSN\Windows Live on the OReily Database War Stories which put it on the same page and made it realize.

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - O’Reilly Database War Stories Highlights

The blog posts has snippets of Database and Scaling stories with some technical details from Google, Flickr(Now Yahoo), Bloglines, Craigslists and so on. And it ends with Dare commenting (hightlighting mine):

I’d have loved to share some of the data we have around the storage infrastructure that handles over 2.5 billion photos for MSN Spaces and over 400 million contact lists with over 8 billion contacts for Hotmail and MSN Messenger. Too bad the series is over. Of course, I probably wouldn’t have gotten the OK from PR to share the info anyway.

In the last 20 days or so since the above post, Dare has not shared the data on his blog which makes me believe he might not be doing it. This has nothing direct against Dare, whose posts have technical value to merit reading.

A similar example is the interview with Hotmail ’s(Microsoft) Phil Smoot with ACM Queue which was lacking in details to make it worth a developer’s time.

Noticing that Google publishes it’s technical implementation papers (Including on MapReduce and Google File System even though they are used for inspiration by competitors like Findory) and some code that Google uses, Livejournal code is available for others. IBM’s algorithms are available for trying out, when will MSN start contributing to the developer community at large.
The Microsoft Research publications do not cover directly anything on the practical implementation topics. The question comes to mind, When will Microsoft\MSN start contributing to the developer community?

Granted it is not obliged to do so under it’s ‘for profit’ charter. It does mean it is not contributing to the overall increase in developer community’s knowledge.

PS: I did search for papers or talks with details on Microsoft\MSN large scale internet services and found nothing. I checked with a source in MSN and found nothing. If I missed it, please email me or add a comment.