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Comment by byoung2 | Hacker News Reader

I could not name a single company that folded because they could not handle the luxury problem of scaling

Friendster is an obvious example that comes to mind:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/business/yourmoney/15frien...

As Friendster became more popular, its overwhelmed Web site became slower. Things would become so bad that a Friendster Web page took as long as 40 seconds to download. Yet, from where Mr. Lindstrom sat, technical difficulties proved too pedestrian for a board of this pedigree. The performance problems would come up, but the board devoted most of its time to talking about potential competitors and new features, such as the possibility of adding Internet phone services, or so-called voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, to the site.

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They didn't fold though, did they? They got bought by some asian consortium iirc. Also, the way you describe that it strikes me as a management problem more than a technical one. Once they had scaling issues they decided to not address them. They could have, but they didn't.

Of course that's stupid.

True, they didn't fold per se, but they likely could have held their own against MySpace and Facebook. They just got bought out a few months ago for $40 million, when they could have had a billion dollar valuation like Facebook or a half-billion dollar buyout like MySpace.

Maybe if they had thought about scaling from the very beginning (like so many startups supposedly waste time doing), they would have had a plan in place to address it without having to bring it up at board meetings.

They could have held their own against MySpace and Facebook if they'd been focused on solving actual technical problems and adding features people wanted to use, instead of solving theoretical technical problems.

When Friendster finally hired Joyce Park to lead a reimplementation of the site (in PHP instead of Java) there was so much conflict over this inside the company that they fired her immediately after she finished, ostensibly for blogging. Imagine what Friendster could have done if user-focused, practical people like Joyce were honored and listened to, instead of tossed out like trash.

(I know Joyce. I'd even say she's a friend of mine, and I hope she'd agree.)

They didn't fold, but they suffered a massive drop in usership. They rolled out a performance overhaul in June 2004 after the majority of users had already given up on the site.

http://troutgirl.wordpress.com/2004/06/29/friendster-goes-ph...

Incidently, the blogger above was fired for posting about the release, so it would seem they had some other serious corporate issues beyond performance.

they moved from jsp to php for performance? huh.

For scalability, not performance exactly.

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