Sure, you probably don't want to run your business on it; we agree. I think it is a missing opportunity for DO to allow growing smaller projects to continue to stay on their platform.
I know so many developers (including me) that build this very thing. There's clearly demand for it, but no incentive for any large services to integrate their stuff into it when they can demand that you go directly to them :(
It doesn't make sense to me to ask developers to not use a newer technology that can make their lives easier and affect bottom lines for business just so we can accommodate a single project with likely a very small set of users. I'm surprised they would even think that is an OK thing to ask.
Downvotes but no responses... But seriously, its already built to a huge scale, its core product that people actually use (newsfeed / apps) havn’t changed in years(functionally - I’m sure the code base has..). is it the appeal of working on a product used by a significant proportion of the worlds population or just working at a huge company?
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If your userbase doesn't think it needs improving, people with unfulfilled requirements will go somewhere else. Which may be a good thing if you want to limit the scope and serve a specific market well. But it may also leave you behind with shrinking usage and few new users. (since they prefer to start with the overall better option)
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.
That's been my view on things. Not that I know your neighbor, but... for a company that has that much marketshare, they concern themselves primarily with catering to getting large amounts of money from larger companies. They've optimized for the fewer use cases, and seem to not understand there's a larger audience who'd be willing to pay them money if the process was easier (even at current prices).
I'm having a hard time understanding why you'd build up a product as a add-on to or heavily reliant on a closed(ish) platform. You're putting yourself at the mercy of a large corporation, that usually doesn't end well.
I completely disagree with the article's author - just because they don't "need" the revenue and there are lots of new areas of development on which to focus is not enough of a reason.
That stems from the wrong idea that a software has to grow endlessly in its user base and revenue.
You start offering A, then you offer everything from A to F, putting complex strains on design and overwhelming your users over and over. Then you start losing the customers that liked A but find the software too bloated.
Why? It's just some contracts and APIs. And it doesn't explain all those other startups that deliberately limit themselves (and then later have to buy local clones because they did not expand quickly enough).
A big reason is that competing with them on equal footing is a monumental task. You are working against network effects, heavy duty marketing, integrations into other products and a whole army of developers.
I don't think the rationale is that they are a large corporation or have lots of money. It's that they have many, many, many more users that would be affected than most companies have.
Throwing infinite money and developers at something does not make a good product.
Source: I work for a SaaS aimed primarily at large banks, most of which attempted to build our product themselves before giving up and signing with us.
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