[jcelerier]

> engineers have a tendency to think about Facebook scale before they have triple-digits of users.

I don't think number of users is what matters except for web services. If you make for instance a photo or audio editing software, there will never be enough performance.

It isn't acceptable to say to your users that your software works fine until, say, 8192*8192 images : if you want to compete against other software, you have to consistently be the fastest at every task that artists may throw at you (else you will get bad reviews on specialist & prosumer press / forums / blogs which can kill your business pretty efficiently... as it takes hundreds of people saying "it's fast" to offset the effect of a single press article saying "it's slow as shit" in art communities).