To avoid a "success disaster" scenario, the unified media software platform should scale to fit capacity requirements as small as a few hundred simultaneous subscribers up to much larger audiences.

By the time Sandberg left Google, there were no more doubts about that company's ability to turn Web traffic into cash. The achievement was so emphatic that Sandberg and her colleagues used to worry about the other extreme, which they called "success disaster," a fairly common fate among tech start-ups.

The MBone has been regarded as one of the Internet's "success disasters": an experiment that has rapidly outgrown the confines of the lab or the testbed, using prototype software that was never meant to operate at the scale that is being demanded by its users.