Tumblr rejected all things Yahoo, except the money, so the answer to just about anything Yahoo asked was either “no”, “get stuffed”, or silence and a note to David that he needed to escalate to Marissa.

On the other side the Yahoo services were so heavily integrated that it was hard to carve out any piece of them, and the few times we tried it was a slow and painful process because Yahoo’s piece was glitchey and unreliable outside of it’s home turf and the Tumblr engineers defensive and argumentative about everything and not willing to help.

> Tumblr rejected all things Yahoo

Having worked at Yahoo, I understand this stance.

That's exactly how I imagined Tumblr's design and development, based on my multiple unsuccessful attempts, over the years, to find any useful navigation between blogs, or the function of reading comments.

> When was this? Being owned by Yahoo, I am surprised they don't use NetApp.

Dell used to offer an online backup service. It wasn't even running on Dell equipment!

Basically they acquired a company that offered the service, and while it would be "nice" if a Dell company ran on Dell gear, a lot of the time it's simply impractical/expensive to overhaul things.