Why Did Friendster Fail?

One of the best pieces of engineering-management advice I ever got goes like this: "Engineers do what you tell them to do - repeatedly." If the board is spending all its time thinking about cool new features, the engineers will implement cool new features. If the board starts talking about performance and communicates that downwards, the performance issues will get fixed.

Remember how Microsoft won the browser wars: Bill Gates took all the company's best developers, put them on the IE team, and refused to speak to anyone unless it was about the Internet. That's the kind of single-minded focus you need to turn a company around.

In spite of the software issues, they had a head start in terms of popularity and users.