That doesn't mean that it's a general rule as I am sure there are plenty of exceptions, but it was still striking. In fact, I think I can say that the places that I have worked that were the most profitable were the ones where everybody agreed that the code base was an absolute mess.
Good code + Good Business = Success.
Bad code + Bad Business = Failure.
Good code + Bad Business = Failure.
Bad Code + Good Business = Success.
Successful businesses can paper over bad code with money, because ultimately bad code just costs the business money.
A better way of thinking about this, I think, is that code quality expresses itself first and foremost in the product's long-term quality. And code quality, like all product quality, costs money.
But not all companies need good quality. Each business niche has a different quality level : product cost niche. A business will do best if the engineering quality matches the business needs, and vice versa.
A company that has spent money writing beautiful code that costs more to support than that business can generate, is in just as bad a place as a business that is growing massively and burning cash papering over a low-quality engineering department with all their new sales contract money.
And vice versa. But while "take a loan to get first version out of the door" is widely understood to be generally good decision, "invest into code so it can pay dividends later" appears to be some dark incantation nobody seems to understand...
More to the point of the Friendster example, that's why Facebook succeeded.
Sure, their code was crappy but the site stayed up.
But code quality is much more flexible than business quality, so that large changes on code still have a smaller impact on success. What absolutely doesn't mean that code is irrelevant; it just means that marketing in incredibly important.
1 - What is a different word from "maximizing" for a reason.
> Successful businesses can paper over bad code with money, because ultimately bad code just costs the business money.
Papering over bad code with money is in my opinion by definition bad business.