Should it be of interest...
... the link below will take you some pretty interesting articles from the development teams at Ancestry - a window into what they do. Being in IT myself, actually what they are doing at the enterprise level is some pretty fab stuff. Due credit, there, very much due in the areas of; Hadoop, Agile at scale, Image Processing, Search, Information management, etc, etc.
Where I would agree very much with the sentiments of this thread, is that in the solution space, the Family Tree Maker application that we all use, sometimes hasn't had the rugged integrity that it absolutely needs, nor the sync interface integrity up to and from the Ancestry cloud.
More from the development teams here:
http://blogs.ancestry.com/techroots/Happy reading.
James Usmar.