Here is another lesson buried in the post: in most cases, faster is better than better. It doesn't matter if you have a much more stable product, with hot swaps

Here is another lesson buried in the post: in most cases, faster is better than better. It doesn't matter if you have a much more stable product, with hot swaps, integrated monitoring, auto-balancing, the whole works. If your competitor is five times faster, you are toast. If you look at the past decade and compare the technologies that "won", you will see that in almost every case, they were faster than the alternatives, and had performance as a major selling point. The notable exception is Ruby on Rails, but it was sold so well (the original Rails screencast was ground-breaking) and it solved such a huge pain point (XML hell) that, in this case, it didn't matter (though even they had to answer the question "but does it scale?" at some point).