Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?
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Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?
#2Parse never made sense to me.
I could see a service like Parse being useful, but it would need to be owned / operated by a nonprofit in order to gain any adoption. Otherwise, it's just another proprietary platform that will get shut off or changed once Facebook (or whoever) pivots to another business model to address that market. There's certainly demand, but I think most developers are wary about putting their company's tech stack at the mercy of a profit-driven company that may abandon them.
In the end though, I just don't think Parse offered enough over existing solutions like AWS and Azure. Both those ecosystems can easily scale from low-end mobile apps (like Parse was designed for) or huge enterprise apps.
It also didn't help that Facebook was unable to onboard a single major IoT vendor onto Parse - IMO this was probably the reason they ended up killing it. If there was zero interest from existing players in the industry, they may have figured there's not much of a market there.
Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?
#3Yeah, it sucks Parse shut down. But that's not an argument to avoid SaaS. My startup is built on over 20+ different third-party tools. It will really, really suck if any of them shut down... but I'd rather deal with that possibility in the future when we have more money and time, than struggle to build everything out ourselves now.
Like I said, it sucks Parse is shutting down. But in ~2 hours, you can get the open source Parse clone they released going and be back to new. Seems better to deal with that now than to have slowed down initial development by building everything in-house.
Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?
#4Parse never made sense to me. I could see a service like Parse being useful, but it would need to be owned / operated by a nonprofit in order to gain any adoption. Otherwise, it's just another proprietary platform that will get shut off or changed once Facebook (or whoever) pivots to another business model to address that market. There's certainly demand, but I think most developers are wary about putting their compa…
So Google App Engine doesn't fit into your thinking at all here. I know of large IoT efforts going on there though. And gaming. Both of which would make sense for Parse if Facebook were serious about it.
Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?
#5Parse never made sense to me. I could see a service like Parse being useful, but it would need to be owned / operated by a nonprofit in order to gain any adoption. Otherwise, it's just another proprietary platform that will get shut off or changed once Facebook (or whoever) pivots to another business model to address that market. There's certainly demand, but I think most developers are wary about putting their compa…
So Google App Engine doesn't fit into your thinking at all here. I know of large IoT efforts going on there though. And gaming. Both of which would make sense for Parse if Facebook were serious about it.
App Engine is far more mature than Parse - it's been around for nearly a decade, the API is stable, and Google's not going anywhere any time soon. App Engine adoption was also very slow to pick up, but it was a more enterprise-targeted computing solution than Parse.
IMO Facebook just decided to cut their losses. Parse was very likely to end up as a low-margin enterprise business with little to no impact on Facebook from a data standpoint. Facebook doesn't really have an enterprise sales division like Google does; and standing up a new sales channel like that is very difficult if you're not sure the margin will be there.
Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?
#6Interesting thought. In fact when I looked at the market of mBaaS, it is interesting that most major competitors after Parse target the Entreprise market, that echo with your 2nd checkbox.
Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?
#7> Large mobile app developers such as mobile gaming companies mostly shunned its service, building in house custom solutions instead. Small to medium sized developers embraced its service, but had a much smaller propensity to spend.
As a developer, I want the platform I choose to rely on to be reliable and unlikely to shut down. I also don't want to spend a lot of money on it. Hmm. Hmmmmmm.
Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?
#8I was hoping for an insider leak...
Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?
#9Parse never made sense to me. I could see a service like Parse being useful, but it would need to be owned / operated by a nonprofit in order to gain any adoption. Otherwise, it's just another proprietary platform that will get shut off or changed once Facebook (or whoever) pivots to another business model to address that market. There's certainly demand, but I think most developers are wary about putting their compa…
I disagree with most of your post, but I think your last paragraph nails it. There was lost of demand and adoption of Parse, but only by thousands of the smallest players who just wouldn't offer FB any real value. I believe FB bought Parse just in case it worked out in one of the possible spaces FB was going to play. But it didn't. Failing at IoT, as you say, was the last straw.
Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?
#10Yeah, it sucks Parse shut down. But that's not an argument to avoid SaaS. My startup is built on over 20+ different third-party tools. It will really, really suck if any of them shut down... but I'd rather deal with that possibility in the future when we have more money and time, than struggle to build everything out ourselves now. Like I said, it sucks Parse is shutting down. But in ~2 hours, you can get the open so…
> in ~2 hours, you can get the open source Parse clone they released going and be back to new
I keep hearing this, and I have a hard time believing it. Are there any examples of a significant app/developer doing this? Sure a working Parse Server is easy to get up and running, but the reason someone wouold choose Parse was to avoid operations, and that's not a service you build in your company in 2 hrs. (as an aside, it looks to me like the Parse Server is a very limited subset of the real Parse)