Wired has a [nice piece up](http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-08/ff_sheep?currentPage=1) showing the strange void in Second Life – where countless companies have gotten in at the ground floor to produce very little.
Stuck in the middle of the article is a paragraph discussing the performance issues that affect Second Life, and theres one thing sticking out like a sore thumb:
> Created by an underfunded startup using a physics engine that’s now years out of date, Second Life is made up of thousands of disconnected “regions” (read: processors), most of which remain invisible unless you explicitly search for them by name. Residents can reach these places only by teleporting into the void. And even the popular islands are never crowded, because each processor on Linden Lab’s servers can handle a maximum of only 70 avatars at a time; more than that and the service slows to a crawl, some avatars disappear, or the island simply vanishes. **”It’s really the software’s fault,” says Andrew Meadows, Linden Lab’s senior developer. “Way back when, we used to say, ‘This is not going to scale.'”**
I certainly appreciate candor and honesty in business people, but there’s a sharp division between “acknowledging a performance issue” and “admitting you knew your system was crap from the start.”