IMHO, this is the truth nugget. Where the rock stars go is where you will find great software and the company culture that works is "stand back and let the rock stars do their thing". That culture can't exist in the enterprise. It doesn't even exist in most startups. I never wanted to believe this but after years of first hand experience, I find the conclusion inescapable.

Agile methodologies can't extract excellence from mediocrity, but they might allow half-decent software to be made without the use of rock stars, by plugging the holes that mediocre developers typically fall into. But is half-decent software even worth making?

XBox is an interesting counter-example. Microsoft completely let that team do their thing. They had total freedom to design and market it. Notice they didn't even have to call it Microsoft Gaming Console.

Source: Chris Capossela's talk at the Business of Software 2009 conference.

That attitude probably had a lot to do with Microsoft's success.

   Is that uptime [Flickr's] acceptable to a bank?

I guess you could say PayPal tries to do this, but you have to get money in and out of PayPal, and they have high fees.

I know they're not playing with a lot of resources, so I'm always amazed at how much better they are at doing EVERYTHING than Chase, etc.

This is also why building (as in skyscraper style) blow outs don't appear as huge - they labour cost is generally a relatively smaller portion of the project cost then the materials compared to IT projects.