2) stimulated Heroku's product roadmap by giving it a very large and loyal design partner
This is very much a double-edged sword. I've seen products get killed because they had one outsized customer with outsized influence over the product design and made it too specific to that customer rather than building something for everyone the customer would have to adapt to.
If they had, heroku would be very different today, since they aren't even doing enterprise contracts anymore (from what I saw of some other comments here). Maybe that would have been a good thing, maybe not.
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This is very much a double-edged sword. I've seen products get killed because they had one outsized customer with outsized influence over the product design and made it too specific to that customer rather than building something for everyone the customer would have to adapt to.
If they had, heroku would be very different today, since they aren't even doing enterprise contracts anymore (from what I saw of some other comments here). Maybe that would have been a good thing, maybe not.