Well, that's really an organizational failure as much as an engineering one. Same as telling the sales manager, "You're responsible for sales, but you can't hir

Well, that's really an organizational failure as much as an engineering one. Same as telling the sales manager, "You're responsible for sales, but you can't hire any sales persons." I'm in Silicon Valley and I see a lot of strange things, but I've never seen a business fail because of product performance or wrong choice of computer language or framework, but: - Friendster did have significant site performance issues that may have contributed to it getting marginalized. - Twitter routinely showed the "fail whale" until they got their act together. - eBay was 30 days late in doing their Japanese version, which allowed Yahoo Auctions to dominate that country. (Their whole i18n situation was a fiasco with parallel US and non-US code bases and url-based locale setting.) - Real Media sold their real5 streaming server to most US radio stations, yet could never get G2 server to work reliably. - I've talked to startups with a 50,000 LOC web product and 200,000 lines of test code. I'm curious how that worked out.