I've seen products developed that required loadbalanced servers with very serious hardware just to run simple intranet websites. Management's idea was to put an idiot in charge of product development, hire programmers that designed genius schemes like client-side javascript building SQL queries that would then run server-side. They doubled down on idiocy by outsourcing to Indians. Hardware was comparatively cheap to the legion of morons they had making the products, if it was slow they just added more servers. Except in reality the annual costs of the hardware and licensing of various lame duck OSes, DBs and software modules was easily more than a million dollars. To make matters worse, large western enterprises are usually dysfunctional and sales of products and systems have more to do with members of the board pushing their other struggling businesses than actual system performance.