Unless the business is a tech company selling enterprise software. If, as other commenters have mentioned, their software is subsumed by cheap or free open alternatives, that could be detrimental.
No, they often do. Netscape couldn't catch with IE because of their convoluted stack. Friendster couldn't catch with Facebook for same reason from what I hear. If you are building web app in COBOL or Fortran, you are certainly at huge disadvantage with someone else doing stuff with modern more richer platforms.
> “Netscape couldn't catch with IE because of their convoluted stack”
Wait what? There are several reasons why IE managed to crush Netscape, but the complexity of their software stack isn't even on that list.
I was working in the industry when all of this went down, and I can assure you that Netscape's software stack had absolutely nothing to do with it. The actual story is mostly about Microsoft leveraging their monopoly to push competitors out. This is part of their standard modus operandi since the company was formed.
If you think I'm wrong, please give some evidence to it.
Microsoft leveraging monopoly power was certainly a/likely the major factor, but Netscape also had serious execution problems trying to get out an email server and directory management product.. at the time they could have stolen significant share from Novell.
A lot of this is I believe covered in the famous "never do a rewrite" JWZ essay and in Ben Horowitz's book.
but the complexity of their software stack isn't even on that list
Yes it was. Building an integrated web/email/etc client was harder than they thought it would be, and then there was the Javagator fiasco.
But what really killed Netscape the company - which was planning to give the browser away anyway to create demand for their expensive server products - was that version 3 of Netscape Enterprise Server was terrible. The only thing less reliable than it was the watchdog process that came with it that was supposed to restart it when (not if) it crashed...
This is true in some cases but I don't think it's particularly relevant to this discussion. A company running COBOL, Delphi, etc. has trouble finding developers. Netscape using C/C++ was not a problem – even today that's every mainstream browser engine and there are a ton of developers at every skill level.
Where Netscape got into trouble was in the decisions which they made: that massive rewrite was poorly timed, along with the catastrophic management failures trying to grow so quickly, and their new codebase was arguably too complex but that's not an argument against the stack unless you're claiming that certain problems couldn't happen in a different stack, which seems implausible.
