>How do these businesses succeed with business people that have no business wit about them, have NO ability to communicate effectively in these critical situations and have awful taste in technical advice?
They take off because they are excellent, useful and timely ideas. Unfortunately, people who have strong, timely ideas, like this one, frequently aren't able to find good technical co-founders, probably because of the "ideas are worthless" meme so many hackers love to recite nowadays.
So the ideas take off anyway, but the sites basically don't have the technical architecture that they should and have to be rewritten later.
It's a shame that they can't be bothered to learn about security, since they're in the business of holding other people's money. It seems that they have killed their amazing opportunity, and deeply harmed the public's confidence in bitcoin at the same time.
No, it seems to have gone fine. A lot of people (including Mt. Gox) decided to start taking security more seriously, and the price of Bitcoin has increased slightly.
Ideas are worthless refers to the fact that an obvious thing is obvious - I would argue that most ideas that go on to become successful products are obvious. Seldom are they really revolutionary. The implementation might be, but the idea itself seldom is.
In the current case, well just because it isn't perfect from a technical standpoint, doesn't mean it wasn't the best execution of the idea out in the wild...
They take off because they are excellent, useful and timely ideas. Unfortunately, people who have strong, timely ideas, like this one, frequently aren't able to find good technical co-founders, probably because of the "ideas are worthless" meme so many hackers love to recite nowadays.
So the ideas take off anyway, but the sites basically don't have the technical architecture that they should and have to be rewritten later.