Take any given production process and assume it is not producing good enough quality let’s call it ‘crap’ to make it a bit more expressive. Now, ask yourself what happens if you scale this process by adding more workers and machines/material. Well?
Indeed, you get more crap! That was easy. Now consider what would happen when this is a production process producing software. In this case, scaling will most likely deteriorate quality in additional way because the people controlling the original scale process now need to divide their attention on a bigger production system. Adding to this the additional costs of maintenance and we get even less production out of the scaled system.
If you don’t have the production process under control before scaling you are at a very high risk. Add to this the business risk (reputation, customer satisfaction, sales) then it is probably a good idea to take the production process really seriously. First do it, then do it right, then do it fast (by scaling or other means).
In short, bad quality scales superlinearly.