The deciding factor, as always, is the ability to manage complexity. There are many ways to improve this ability, and process is certainly one of them, however, the choice of programming language is, to my mind, the most important one.
XenSource/Citrix is another great example[1]:
“In 2002, members of Cambridge University released the open source Xen project to provide free high-performance virtualization technology for the masses.”
“In 2004, the team founded the company XenSource and began developing the enterprise-level distributed management software that would make virtualization easy and form the backbone of their products in the years to come. A team of thirty dedicated programmers in Palo Alto California began developing the software in C, Python and Ruby.”
“Two years later, the US team had succeeded in burning tens of millions of dollars funding but had failed to produce any product. So XenSource, under new management, took the bold step of replacing their large team of US developers with a team of only four British OCaml developers. Within months, all of the Python and Ruby was replaced, both reliability and performance were dramatically improved and the company shipped their first product. One year later, XenSource sold to Citrix for $500M.”
[1]: http://ocamlnews.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/stunning-slides-abou...