[mrwww]

I have done the building in quite a few of these.

Often what happens is that the engineering that made it a cool demo in the beginning, is pushed aside, and once funding and a variety of product managers and sales people start chiming in, users and genuine value proposition is forgotten in favor of things that sound huge for the business, in theory. Not seen it materialize in practice yet.

[swalsh]

Yeah, the opportunist managers are attracted to fresh value like sharks to blood. They always destroy it because they're trying to add in something that's good for their business (great story for upper management) but is either not wanted or even repulsive to the customer. It usually comes at the expense of the core value proposition.