So what's the digg story here?
I get that some VP suggested a new buzzwordy technology, they gave him enough rope to hang himself and he did and left the company with a broken pile of crap. It could happen, if you have a healthy company you give trust to people. That it got this far doesn't speak well of the rest of management. It doesn't speak really well of the rest of the team either. Shouldn't there have been some circuit breakers or something?
Digg isn't a poor, bring-your-own-laptop startup. They've got resources, they've had substantial investment. They can afford to build and test software and I know of no real marketing reason they had to push something untested out. Rose could go out and say it wasn't done, it's going to take more time.
How does Rose keep his job? Wasn't he this VP's boss?
And it's single technology? That couldn't have been vetted and tested independently of all of digg? Really? And MongoDB, or hadoop, or one of the dozens of other nosqls wouldn't work, either? You do what you have to do and there is never a 'truth' with VPs and CxOs are canned, but it all doesn't float with me, just looks like another over valued and under talented company, got lucky and the blind squirrel found the nut, there isn't gonna be a second act.
Maybe it just seems low brow to me, name and finger the guy, blame the opensource tool you use, never explain or elaborate why you launched anyways when you were fixing bugs in the tool at the 11th hour.