That said, it also doesn’t change the fact that Reply isn’t up to load that it currently has. You’d expect a start-up w/ $17 million in funding to a) hire enough test engineers to stress test their app and fix obvious bugs before they launch, b) have enough hardware on hand to handle the load, and c) hire design engineers smart enough to take full advantage of their respective toolset. Clearly Reply has had a bad first day. The real litmus test will be if/when Reply gets out of Beta.

Regards

And thanks for the link showing that it took Zillow somewhere around 6-8 hours to get back to full operations (view the very next entry on your link for context). Did Reply just launch today? I mean they haven’t even been dugg recently and they can’t return a simple lookup without a script timeout in the middle of Wednesday morning?

Yes Zillow uses MS SQL 2005, not a bad product. But what really makes it sing at Zillow is their in-house-rolled Debian to parse the data.

I love you Microsofties because you make my property worth more, but often you believe your own press too much.

Cheers.

Do you forget that Zillow had perf problems when it launched? I think this just shows that the engineers at Zillow have spent more time tuning their app or the operations team at Zillow has spent more money on hardware than Reply has done to date. Since 3 of the 5 busiest sites on the web (MSN, MySpace & eBay) run on Windows/IIS, the fact that Reply is slow doesn’t prove anything in the great platform wars. A true craftsman doesn’t blame his tools.

I do think it shows that Zillow has smarter engineers though. Time will tell if the engineers at Reply have a clue. I would’ve at least used ASP.net instead of Classic ASP (which scales FAR better).

FYI – Zillow currently uses MS SQL 2005 on the back-end, and linux/apache/java on front-end & middle tier.

I love the fact that you can put reply up next to zillow for a good old side by side performance comparison of a site running windows/IIS/asp and a site running linux/apache/java.

Thanks Reply for showing how good an open source stack can be in such a directly comparable way!

I think the “fantasy” that sells it is the idea that people will make high offers to home owners that will entice them to sell when they’re not otherwise interested. The reality is that homeowners will get blasted with all kinds of low-ball, worthless offers and the system will be gamed by commercial entitites (like an unscrupulous agent placing “bids” to get clients for listings) in short order.

We’re all inundated enough with offers to buy everything under the sun via legitimate mass mail, catalogs, emails. Then you add spam to that and it’s enough. I don’t need another source for people I don’t know to ask me about something I don’t want to do.

Frankly, it’s one reason why zillow’s gonna be more successful than HouseValues. You don’t have to sign up for anything. You don’t have to wait for a response. You don’t end up inundated with commerical mailings for bi-weekly mortgages, or “neighborhood reports” from every agent, etc.

Enough. I’ll list my home when I want, and look for homes when I want. The features that put the consumer in control are the ones that have a future.