Because they write a lot of software and tutorials on multiple platforms for the devices they sell and people are willing to pay a little more to support them.
Lots of reasons why, but mostly because the buyers aren't the users in most cases. If users got to pick what they could use in a big company it'd be a WAY different story.
Because then they can't get shafted by the company's crazy storage and service costs and they'd miss out on a few bucks at the expense of usability. And I mean who cares about that while developing? You aren't the sucker using it!
Mind share and Market share are the justifications. Once you have a developer comfortable with a platform, it can be hard to impossible to get them to switch.
These are businesses with an interest in making money, not people with an interest in making the world a better place. I'm not saying it's right, just that it makes business sense.
I think the main reason is that they can afford to not care. There is no pressure. They can afford to be inefficient because they know that as long as the core features work, customers will not leave.
Their users (scumware peddlers) aren't susceptible to market pressure from the poor bastards who end up with their vectored garbage ruining their computing experience. Where's the incentive to make less money, once it's nut-cutting time?
Because it's better to have a small slice of a market that you can compete on than nothing on a market that is dominated by other players.
This supposed competitive advantage that they would have would mean nothing if they still had to work on top of other IaaS-providers. They would be undercut by the IaaS themselves. By changing the game, they get another angle to work from.
The reason usually is that there are people with a lot of money to throw around and there are others with less money who instead invest time to research where they can save it on a product. If then they not only find a way to save money on a product but also one with more features (so more for less) than the one people throw money at, they are in disbelieve why somebody would throw that money on the worse alternative.
I see this as quite reasonable thinking for somebody who never had too much money.
Of course it might be that in this case the much more obvious is the case: throwing your most important data into a cloud on a close source system is kinda..."optimistic".
Because they can deliver the content that users pay for though one platform. no need to deploy a major software update, full regression test, just for some political reason.
I've read some reasoning about that when they introduced the product... and it wasn't convincing (something about keeping discussion on topic I believe?). I really think their reason is ease of design, implementation, maintenance and scalability.
Because it's a strategic risk for a hardware maker to be dependent on an outside company's software application to move hardware units. Reason being that the other company could take the killer app to another platform and quit supporting your platform altogether - and then your sales go down the tubes.
Its easy to do this when you have no strong competition, and don't care if you piss off your existing customers.
The irony is they want to ride the new wave of public cloud computing, going so far as to sponsor development of a memory database (Redis), and then go and do something regressive like slapping a 24GB-per-CPU memory limit on their core product without a price decrease.
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