The other day I sat down to document exactly how Spanning Sync works—not just the client and server code, but the whole business. Actually I didn't sit down, I went for a run. And I didn't so much "document" it all as take a mental inventory.
Anyway, during my inventory I realized that we use various bits from infrastructure from each of the four companies that comprise ebayahooglezon: eBay (PayPal for payments), Yahoo (del.icio.us for tracking reviews), Google (GData API's, Groups, FeedBurner, Analytics, YouTube, Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Docs) and Amazon (S3 for downloads). Whew.
There are a few services that we use that notably don't belong to ebayahooglezon, including TypePad, Digg, and old-school hosting from ServerBeach. But it's remarkable how much infrastructure, all of it either free or very inexpensive, comes from these four providers. It's even more remarkable how much of it comes from just one of them: Google.
If we used Google Checkout instead of PayPal, Blogger instead of TypePad, Google Reader clippings instead of deli.cio.us, and AppEngine instead of ServerBeach, and if Google were to go ahead, pull the trigger, and buy Digg, Google would be operating essentially 100% of our infrastructure.
We're not going to do that. But the fact that we could gives me the Microsoftie heebie jeebies.
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