While I sure like the features listed in this thread, I understood the question in a differnt way.
My lessons ´d be:
1) A friendly and helpful team can produce great work. You don´t have to be elitist to win.
2) If you have a lot of cool public domain software, you will grow your user base.
3) A single man can write a better programm than a huge company.
4) Most business computers and software is a complete waste of money.
5) A killer game machine is really a killer machine for almost every task.
6) look at the low end to decide where to place your defaults.
