[michaelt]

Well, there's more than one way to block new endeavors.

Many organisations sometimes have costly problems, and try to learn from them by adding new procedures to stop the problems recurring. After a few years, an accumulation of such procedures can raise the costs of a new project significantly - even though every rule is a reasonable one put in place with the best of intentions.

For example, where a startup can test a concept with a PHP website on a single server using MySQL, a large company might have standards calling for a high availability configuration, a 24/7 support rota, monitoring logging testing automatic scalability change management backups and security to these standards/levels and independently audited, a bug bounty program...

Before you know it a project a startup could have prototyped with one guy and a week needs several guys and several months - but the reasons for it are all individually reasonable and firing the people behind them makes no sense at all.