Bad development practices can and do kill companies, although in those cases the cause of death is usually considered "failed to innovate" or something similar. Accumulate enough technical debt and you'll be unable to move very quickly for fear of breaking things. After code starts breaking expect to add processes on top of processes, which may stop the breakage but only slow things down even further.
That's not to say that bad programming is the only reason companies fail to innovate, but if the code gets bad enough things will show down and newer competitors will overtake you.
As I asked in my response, Please provide examples.
Bad coding does not mean 'failed to innovate'. Digg.com innovated with the Digg button, but according to Kevin they had a bunch of 'bad coders' doing 'bad coding'.
Bad coding does not mean "failed to innovate" but bad coding will certainly lead to failure to innovate.
There are many, many companies that fall into that category but if you want a direct example of bad coding -> failure then look at Friendster:
"But the board also lost sight of the task at hand, according to Kent Lindstrom, an early investor in Friendster and one of its first employees. As Friendster became more popular, its overwhelmed Web site became slower. Things would become so bad that a Friendster Web page took as long as 40 seconds to download. Yet, from where Mr. Lindstrom sat, technical difficulties proved too pedestrian for a board of this pedigree."
There is hardly ever a single reason why a company fails, but site performance and the inability/unwillingness to address it played a large part in Friendster's decline.
We really are arguing in circles here, because there could be many reasons for the slowness at Friendster. Didn't have to be bad coding. It could have been insufficient hardware. No matter how good the developers were, if their hardware can only manage X number of concurrent users with max optimizations, when growth brought in X^2, no amount of 'good development' would solve that issue.
However, I do agree with your point that there isn't just one thing that kills a company. That was my original point.
The TC article made it sound as if 'bad coders' killed companies. That is very delusional and it flatters developers too much. They are important, but not THAT important. That's my point.
Please don't flame me, as a developer myself, I am fully aware of where my expertise (and value-add) stops.
That's not to say that bad programming is the only reason companies fail to innovate, but if the code gets bad enough things will show down and newer competitors will overtake you.