[justapassenger]

There’s big gap between not being a schmuck and getting your company to be one of the biggest tech behemoths.

Rewriting app, means years of no new features (like Twitter did with their backend rewrite). That’s a very vulnerable period of time. And no guarantee that their apps will be any good (especially given their track record of low quality). It wasn’t guaranteed in any way that they will start making meaningful money on mobile.

They could’ve easily end up like Twitter, plagued with reliability issues and no good monetization.