Lack of investment in the actual technology, poor vision for what the product could be...they focused on extracting short term value at the expense of long term

Lack of investment in the actual technology, poor vision for what the product could be...they focused on extracting short term value at the expense of long term value. A key example is the interstitial page with the countdown timer whenever you want to download anything that forces you to sit there and watch an ad. Anytime you see something like that, run. Those kinds of decisions are made at the board level to generate revenue, generally because the investors don't have enough money to actually keep the company running and working on higher value, longer term bets. If not made at the board level, it's symptomatic of a dysfunctional and incompetent product organization that doesn't really care about the product, and views what they are doing as a job they'll be gone from in a few months or year anyway.