"Software devs were probably doing agile before it was called agile. And most likely because because they had to get the job done despite management obstacles. As a matter of fact it's true even within Perl ... Stuff that now has a name and an acronym and an O'Reilly book, and an interview question/litmus test, used to be simply best practices ..."

So that explains why those companies are failing to scale while companies that have adopted Scrum/Agile are succeeding.