Why did Heroku fail?
matt-rickard.com
Why did Heroku fail?
1–10 of 161 posts
Re: Why did Heroku fail?
#2I read the article but I'm still confused by the premise. What does it mean that Heroku failed? They're still around although owned by Salesforce. Are there are metrics that they're not making money or have no/negative growth? What am I missing?
Re: Why did Heroku fail?
#3The implication here is that Heroku is a standalone company with its full efforts being put toward the product.
The article should, in my opinion, focus on why Salesforce allowed Heroku to stagnate and grow uncompetitive.
[Disclaimer: Salesforce employee, thoughts and opinions are my own]
Re: Why did Heroku fail?
#4I read the article but I'm still confused by the premise. What does it mean that Heroku failed? They're still around although owned by Salesforce. Are there are metrics that they're not making money or have no/negative growth? What am I missing?
The article also says that OpenShift failed, even though it is also still around and (presumably) making money.
Re: Why did Heroku fail?
#5I read the article but I'm still confused by the premise. What does it mean that Heroku failed? They're still around although owned by Salesforce. Are there are metrics that they're not making money or have no/negative growth? What am I missing?
They have not pushed out any notable updates in a long time, bugs have remained unfixed for many years, customer support is unhelpful. All of the most talented engineers at Heroku left, the team now functions as an internal infra team for Salesforce. It's a zombie of a company.
The product and pricing are pretty good for small projects, but almost everyone outgrows Heroku well before they transition from "small" to "medium". The pricing model hasn't changed in many years. Dyno sizing hasn't changed or improved pretty much ever. Now that compelling alternatives to Heroku exist (Render, fly, even Netlify) there's no good reason to launch a new project on Heroku. Hell, even Elastic Beanstalk manages to give a decent experience for many folks compared to Heroku.
Re: Why did Heroku fail?
#6The implication here is that Heroku is a standalone company with its full efforts being put toward the product. The article should, in my opinion, focus on why Salesforce allowed Heroku to stagnate and grow uncompetitive. [Disclaimer: Salesforce employee, thoughts and opinions are my own]
Exactly this.
Re: Why did Heroku fail?
#7The implication here is that Heroku is a standalone company with its full efforts being put toward the product. The article should, in my opinion, focus on why Salesforce allowed Heroku to stagnate and grow uncompetitive. [Disclaimer: Salesforce employee, thoughts and opinions are my own]
- Heroku generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue. There are plenty of interesting things to debate about its past and future, but it was not a failure by any reasonable definition.
- Salesforce did ~27b in revenue in 2022; its very hard for a comparatively small business to get resources / mindshare in that environment, especially when you focus on a market / audience that is different than the rest of the business. From a strategy POV, for better or worse, Salesforce is not particularly focused on integrated acquired products - its interested in selling them largely as is to existing customers. Fundamentally its a financial engineering and sales exercise, not a product innovation one. (Not to say I support or think thats the best way of driving growth, but offering my POV on the structural dynamics.)
Re: Why did Heroku fail?
#8Salesforce also owns Slack... Is this a preview of what will happen to it?
Re: Why did Heroku fail?
#9I read the article but I'm still confused by the premise. What does it mean that Heroku failed? They're still around although owned by Salesforce. Are there are metrics that they're not making money or have no/negative growth? What am I missing?
They have not pushed out any notable updates in a long time, bugs have remained unfixed for many years, customer support is unhelpful. All of the most talented engineers at Heroku left, the team now functions as an internal infra team for Salesforce. It's a zombie of a company. The product and pricing are pretty good for small projects, but almost everyone outgrows Heroku well before they transition from "small" to "…
> the team now functions as an internal infra team for Salesforce
This is definitely false. Though some internal apps are deployed on Heroku, it is not the primary deployment target for new projects. Heroku staff work on Heroku. Salesforce has a large internal infra program and team that has no overlap with Heroku. past codename projects have been proposed to change this, but none have ever come to be.
Re: Why did Heroku fail?
#10The implication here is that Heroku is a standalone company with its full efforts being put toward the product. The article should, in my opinion, focus on why Salesforce allowed Heroku to stagnate and grow uncompetitive. [Disclaimer: Salesforce employee, thoughts and opinions are my own]
- Heroku generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue. There are plenty of interesting things to debate about its past and future, but it was not a failure by any reasonable definition. - Salesforce did ~27b in revenue in 2022; its very hard for a comparatively small business to get resources / mindshare in that environment, especially when you focus on a market / audience that is different than the re…
I heard revenue and margins weren't sustainable prior to the acquisition