Goldman does have excellent IT vs other big i-banks. (Well, now they're all bank holding companies since they wanted (or were compelled to want, depending on who is telling the story) to gain access to the Fed's discount window.)

But slang, their proprietary language, has a pretty mediocre reputation. Every strat I know there hates it; anecdotal, I know, but still. It is old -- in use for at least 15 years as far as I know -- and cripplingly slow both to develop in and run. From what I hear, where speed matters a fair bit of C++ and even some Erlang (!) are in production use.

Goldman is doing well because it is full of bright people who are very good at their jobs. Last spring/summer/fall, however, Goldman had lost vast piles of money, particularly in their Global Alpha fund. It is true that Goldman had started to go short on housing as early as late 2007; this is why they didn't get pummeled as badly as their big-bank cohorts.[1] The nice rebound is due to a variety of factors, not the least of which is that part about bright people who are good at their jobs, plus a general market rise, plus govt rent seeking (you better believe it), etc.

[1] The mortgage-related products whose implosion wiped out the market and many players are all short-term vehicles. Indeed, the problem was specifically that mortgages were not treated like old school bonds with a long maturity, but that the income stream from these mortgages was sliced and diced into a wide variety of CDOs with a dizzying number of tranches such that they could be securitized and treated as virtually short-term instruments.