success disaster

n.

Massive problems created when a person or company is unable to handle an overwhelming success.

Example Citations:

By the time Sandberg left Google, there were no more doubts about that company's ability to turn Web traffic into cash. The achievement was so emphatic that Sandberg and her colleagues used to worry about the other extreme, which they called "success disaster," a fairly common fate among tech start-ups.

—Kevin Conley, " Sheryl Sandberg: What She Saw at The Revolution: http://www.vogue.com/magazine/article/sheryl-sandberg-what-she-saw-at-the-revolution/\#1," Vogue, May 1, 2010

To avoid a "success disaster" scenario, the unified media software platform should scale to fit capacity requirements as small as a few hundred simultaneous subscribers up to much larger audiences.

—Alex Dobrushin, " Multiscreen delivery: http://broadcastengineering.com/RF/multiscreen_delivery/," Broadcast Engineering, August 15, 2011

Earliest Citation:

The MBone has been regarded as one of the Internet's "success disasters": an experiment that has rapidly outgrown the confines of the lab or the testbed, using prototype software that was never meant to operate at the scale that is being demanded by its users.

—Ajit S. Thyagarajan et al., " Making the MBone Real: http://www.isoc.org/inet95/proceedings/PAPER/227/html/paper.html," ISOC, May 10, 1995

Notes: Related Words:

black swan

Slashdot effect

Categories:

Business (General)

Technology (General)