Nothing says that the custom solution would have worked. I was hired to do a custom e-commerce solution. We finished a prototype and had a few customers that used it. It was looking good up to the time we ran out of money and closed shop.

Software development is hard. Mix that with the difficulty of starting a new business and it's even harder to get things going.

There are so many reasons why the business could have failed so blaming T for the failure does not make sense. The business managers had way more influence on whether the company was going to succeed. T might have been part of the problem but I'm pretty sure it was only a small part of it. If the company really had a winning business then it would have found a way to success.