[wallflower]

Technology can be ported. User base doesn't care about the underlying technology, if they get value from using your service.

Good read from 2000-era

"This white paper discusses the approach used to convert the Hotmail web server farm from UNIX to Windows 2000"

"Hotmail has grown from 9 million accounts when it was acquired by Microsoft, to 100 million in July 2000, without significant changes in the hardware or software architecture"

"The most challenging, and anticipated, problem with converting from CGI to ISAPI derives from the forgiving nature of the CGI..."

[PDF] http://tonnerre.users.bsdprojects.net/doc/facts/microsoft/Ho...

[drusenko]

you're talking about a huge acquisition here... if you want to sell the company for 5-15 million, language will matter a lot more.

[SwellJoe]

What makes you think so? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't see why this would be an obvious conclusion.

[drusenko]

at 5-15 and even more so at the 1-5 range (where we've seen a decent amount of activity lately), user base isn't the defining factor in the acquisition. in the not-very-well-named "hiring bonus" style exits (who receives a hiring bonus of $1.5M anyway??) certain acquirers will be paying attention to the language you're written in. others might not.

[SwellJoe]

OK, I guess if we keep going lower and lower, I can see at some point the language/infrastructure transition costs become a significant portion of the acquisition.

It'd depend on the product, I think. A half million line codebase would cost millions to translate, while 40k lines would cost a max of tens of thousands (assuming languages of similar capabilities--like Ruby-Python-Perl). But, a half million lines of code isn't going to go for $1.5M except in a fire sale.

But, I reckon this has some bearing on folks building on Google App Engine. That's a bigger form of lock-in than most, and since the apps being built there will be quite small for the foreseeable future, it makes the barrier to exit much higher for folks who might have been willing to sell for $1.5M but could only get an offer of 1M from GOOG or 800k from somebody else (because they would then have to port the application, even if they don't mind it being in Python).

So, I obviously buy your reasoning once you get down into the single digit millions (or sub-million) acquisition prices, and I also buy your reasoning that those kinds of acquisitions are becoming a lot more common.