[augustohp]

There are a couple of reasons but I can cite a few, I tried to push for PaaS and failed the hard way:

1. No widespread practice of environment provisioning automation. Today Docker and k8s are ubiquitous. Having a list of requirements your application needs well kept were hard to find - which Heroku needs. 2. In the same sense as above, automated deployment was not a common thing. 3. Barriers to cloud adoption. Development tools were not widespread. Paying for software development and deployment is common now, it wasn't.