I hate to speculate, given that I don't have individual insight about Facebook. However, I did work on developer-facing products at Uber and learned a bit about what it takes for such a product to succeed or fail.
Ultimately, the success of AWS-like developer tools depends almost entirely on executive buy-in--maybe even more so than product-market fit. Amazon is unique in the the executives at the top clearly believe in giving AWS everything it needs to succeed. Other companies are often run by executives either don't believe in the business value of developer tools or they're unwilling to commit the resources for any developer-facing product to succeed.
Facebook is an interesting example in that they open-source such great technology even purchased https://parseplatform.org/ in 2013, but they shut down and open-sourced Parse a few years later. I'm guessing that the execs at the top didn't feel that the business value of Parse was worth the ops burden.
A few years ago, Steve Yegge wrote about the differences between Amazon and Google in how they thought about developer platforms[1]. A lot has changed since then--Google+ is no more and Google Cloud is a much bigger business, but Yegge's post describes a dilemma that all consumer-facing companies have.
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I hate to speculate, given that I don't have individual insight about Facebook. However, I did work on developer-facing products at Uber and learned a bit about what it takes for such a product to succeed or fail.
Ultimately, the success of AWS-like developer tools depends almost entirely on executive buy-in--maybe even more so than product-market fit. Amazon is unique in the the executives at the top clearly believe in giving AWS everything it needs to succeed. Other companies are often run by executives either don't believe in the business value of developer tools or they're unwilling to commit the resources for any developer-facing product to succeed.
Facebook is an interesting example in that they open-source such great technology even purchased https://parseplatform.org/ in 2013, but they shut down and open-sourced Parse a few years later. I'm guessing that the execs at the top didn't feel that the business value of Parse was worth the ops burden.
A few years ago, Steve Yegge wrote about the differences between Amazon and Google in how they thought about developer platforms[1]. A lot has changed since then--Google+ is no more and Google Cloud is a much bigger business, but Yegge's post describes a dilemma that all consumer-facing companies have.
[1]: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611