As an example, they could have gone with Zurb Foundation instead of doing Bootstrap. They could have used (redo, cmake, tup, a hundred of other tools) instead of doing Pants.
If Twitter was non-profit, their breadth of products would have been awesome. But it's for-profit, and most of these projects are negative on the P&L summary, even if you favourably take into account intangibles like "help in recruiting people" and "coolness of brand".
No but that's the majority; I simplified on purpose but obviously they have far, far more people there than necessary.
> lots of well-maintained OSS projects (Mesos, Aurora, Finagle, Pants, Bootstrap, Zipkin)
As much as I love OSS it does not pay the bills.
google ads is funding the other google, which behaves like a non-profit. and it works, as their ad business is amazing.
but, it sets a really bad example to follow. twitter thought a long time they could operate like google it seems. time to bring back reality.