EC was chock-full of smart engineers but suffered from the "too many mad scientists, not enough hunchbacks" problem and had a management team grafted on from Creative Labs (which seemed like a smart move at the time since they had brought SoundBlaster to market dominance.) The real tragedy is that the company founders were fixated on the idea that they were creating a mall-like "virtual world" and remainded completely oblivious to the fact that they were sitting on a working scalable, secure MMORPG engine at least five years before anyone else was even close.