[brianm]

The technical heavy lift is rarely the success determinant, so having a company implement half-baked (enough for internal use, but without the edges polished off that are needed to support it with external customers) versions of N related (but not yet mature) technologies is pretty normal (if they are full of good engineers) and getting advantage from it.

Most of the time these implementations are too tightly tied to the rest of the company's infra to be useful standalone. When one of those companies succeeds a common pattern is for engineers to cash out, leave, and build a new startup around one technology from the success story.

I would not be surprised if this is one of the forces that drives the consumer -> infra -> consumer -> infra cycle. A consumer wave leads to inventing lots of interesting but bespoke infra while it is growing like crazy. When it plateaus, folks spin out the interesting infra bits until the next consumer wave (generally larger) starts rising.