91–100 of 205 posts
ffffuuuuuuuu
I interviewed with Salesforce and I have to tell you that I found their culture a bit ....weird. It's something I couldn't put my finger on but I just had the feeling that they were all in some sort of cult or something. I didn't get the job. Probably a good thing.
But that last 2% made us scratch our heads and say, "Really?"
Stuff like telling us that they cannot possibly break our apps when they push new code to the underlying platforms, that we have no need for backups because version control will suffice, etc.
These things are probably true for operational needs, but they seemed to not think deeply about DR or edge cases.
Wow. Didn't expect that. Didn't they just do some more capital raising themselves?
I had envisioned Heroku to be a standalone player. It's Paas model was looking like it would be a game-changer. I didn't think they would sell - at least, not this soon. I understand cash is king, but this was a company I had hoped would stand its ground to be something great.
It's also certainly possible the investors pressured the sale to get their money back out of the deal.
This is great news for Heroku and YC (congratulations folks!). That said, does anyone have any insights on why exactly SalesForce would buy Heroku? What is the business rationale? "This is Salesforce’s fifth acquisition this year. Earlier purchases include Activa Live, Sitemasher and Jigsaw. Salesforce.com also spent $170 million to fully acquire its Japanese subsidiary, Salesforce Japan." Anyone see a pattern? I don…
My guess as to why is here: http://swombat.com/2010/12/8/salesforce-buys-heroku (in short, Salesforce is looking to make a credible entry into the "public IT cloud provider" sector - much like they signalled with database.com yesterday)
Everyone is happy for Heroku (I'm pretty sure this beats Mint for the canonical "ideal exit" case), and everyone is scared as a customer (I have no idea where I would build and alternatively easy-to-use Rails app that was as cheap). ffffuuuuuuuu
Granted, getting Heroku level reliability, ease of scaling, etc, but since you said 'cheap,' I'll assume you weren't using much of that anyway. ;)
Heroku will now be subject to all kinds of pressures and asinine ideas that may not relate to their core offering. As a Heroku user I am concerned and saddened.
Can anyone offer any perspective? I'm puzzled by the acquisition mindset.
I've honestly never understood why startups want to be acquired (besides the monetary gain for individual employees). Doesn't acquisition often destroy or dilute the very successes they've worked so hard to build? (I worked for an acquisitive company that worsened nearly every product/company it acquired.) Why not just focus on making your business better? Heroku will now be subject to all kinds of pressures and asin…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had envisioned Heroku to be a standalone player. It's Paas model was looking like it would be a game-changer. I didn't think they would sell - at least, not this soon. I understand cash is king, but this was a company I had hoped would stand its ground to be something great.
I'm also surprised they sold. $212M is nothing to sneeze at, but maybe Heroku was looking 5 years down the road and not seeing the growth or revenue they had expected? It's also certainly possible the investors pressured the sale to get their money back out of the deal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how much its just Mark poking Larry with a stick. "So you bought Java, eh? Who cares? I don't need to rely on Java, I've got all the cool kids and their RoR apps!" (212M is an expensive stick though...)
RoR for dynamic HTML apps used to be the coolest thing but now the really new/cool stuff is written as a JSON server talking to AJAX and mobile clients. In this world node.js, clojure and erlang (maybe) are cooler than RoR.