The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace

It once promised to redefine music, politics, dating, and pop culture. Rupert Murdoch fell in love with it. Then everything fell apart 

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_27/b4235053917570.htm

my takeaway form business week article :

The downfall of myspace :

The Big Corporation Culture – makes the business leader out of focus  

"I think any time a startup is acquired, there's always a certain amount of culture clash," DeWolfe continues. "There are more meetings during the day with a big company. There are three different levels of finance that you need to go through. There are people that want to meet with you in other divisions, and it's a professional courtesy to see how you can work with them. So from that perspective, you sort of end up taking your eye off the ball.

  

 

Money over product – money over user experience à KILLS the product

"There was a lot of pressure to drive revenue," adds Shawn Gold, Myspace's former head of marketing and content. "There were things that we knew would be more efficient for the user that we didn't act on immediately because it would reduce page views, which would have hurt the bottom line."

Don’t try to be great at all fields, pick a handful and harness it

While Facebook focused on creating a robust platform that allowed outside developers to build new applications, Myspace did everything itself. "We tried to create every feature in the world and said, 'O.K., we can do it, why should we let a third party do it?' " says DeWolfe. "We should have picked 5 to 10 key features that we totally focused on and let other people innovate on everything else."

Some ideas, such as classifieds, represented real business opportunities, DeWolfe says, but didn't get enough manpower. Others, such as karaoke, were niche products that diverted energy from less glamorous, more practical concerns. "There were simple things we just didn't execute well on, like address-book importing," he says. "It's a blocking-and-tackling sort of feature that we didn't really have nailed down." 

"Myspace went too wide and not deep enough in its product development," Gold says. "We went with a lot of products that were shallow and not the best products in the world."

Set your organization job function into 2 separate function : Product Management and Product Development

"Myspace got to a point where they were not innovating technologically," Boyd says. "They were having to do all technical innovations to address the various panics that are happening. Basically their development cycle turned into one of crisis management, not one of innovation."