While the article certainly emphasizes that the non-technical board was a detriment to the company, I think that the fundamental problem is revealed in the quote We completely failed to execute.
Their product didn't work well, and this problem existed before the influx of money and board members. Blaming it on the board is conventient, but even the best board can't make a company successful if their product is broken.
The board, however, can direct attention toward fixing the broken product. From the article, it sounds like Friendster's board didn't do this. Instead of focusing their attention on fixing performance problems and making the site usable, they had pie-in-the-sky notions of beating Google and Yahoo and getting into the VOIP space.
One of the best pieces of engineering-management advice I ever got goes like this: "Engineers do what you tell them to do - repeatedly." If the board is spending all its time thinking about cool new features, the engineers will implement cool new features. If the board starts talking about performance and communicates that downwards, the performance issues will get fixed.
Remember how Microsoft won the browser wars: Bill Gates took all the company's best developers, put them on the IE team, and refused to speak to anyone unless it was about the Internet. That's the kind of single-minded focus you need to turn a company around.
I'd agree, if the article was about how the board tried to stimulate a cult of quality within the company, and despite their best efforts they simply weren't able to salvage anything from the software.
In spite of the software issues, they had a head start in terms of popularity and users.
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/10/14/business/15friend_Chart_ready.html