Having read the article, as well as Scoble article linked I would have to disagree that it was the Microsoft stack. There was just not enough investment in thei

Having read the article, as well as Scoble article linked I would have to disagree that it was the Microsoft stack. There was just not enough investment in their programmers. I work at a small startup where money is rather tight while we raise funding and attempt to get contracts in, yet us developers get what we need. Every developer has at least two screens (be it a laptop and a large LCD, or a desktop with two the same monitors). We can ask for new staging servers, we can ask for more memory, we can set up our own infrastructure, and we can make technical decisions. Once you start taking away the ability of devs to think for themselves or feel comfortable doing work it makes it harder to be motivated to come into work and fix the issues, and if management isn't listening to the complaints about the need to re-factor then what is the point? Adding hack onto hack gets boring pretty damn fast. MySpace also lost in that they really didn't have a direction of where they were going (at least that is what it looks like looking in). Blogs, music, status updates, what was it supposed to be? And it didn't help that all over their web properties they didn't have a consistent look and feel because they allowed everyone and their mother to skin their profile page how they saw fit leaving it a disjointed mess that just made me hate the site more.