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Why did Heroku fail?

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Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#31

Post by craigkerstiens »

bastawhiz wrote: post #5
bko wrote: post #2

I 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 "…

This is a bad take without much internal context. Heroku is not thriving as it stands today. It takes a lot just to run Heroku and the engineers still around care deeply around it. I'm excited for a lot of the new offerings like Fly and Railway, but they aren't operating at the same scale as Heroku.

It does feel like there continues to be a fading at a leadership level about developer experience and what it means. There may not be strategy for what makes Heroku the next Heroku whether engineering or product, but the team that is still there is a solid set of engineers, not 100% there for Salesforce internal stuff, and kudos to them for still keeping afloat what is one of the better ways to deploy an app.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#32

Post by jchw »

njudah wrote: post #7
aquaticsunset wrote: post #3

The 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…

Of course, there’s other success metrics than just financials. I think healthy financials are definitely a trailing indicator when it comes to innovation, and that it’s probably fair to say thay Heroku either has or is losing leadership over the future of its niche (PaaS.) I’ve been a vocal fan of Fly.io here; it’s a bit apples and oranges, but it really feels like they finally are fully scratching an itch that Heroku originally made me cognizant of.

That said, having good ideas is nothing if you can’t prove it in the market, but I do think Heroku will be around for a very long time by the nature of how sticky its customers can be, so it’s hard to use that to judge the future.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#33

Post by nickstinemates »

tempnow987 wrote: post #25
aquaticsunset wrote: post #3

The 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]

It is not easy for a smaller tech company (often happy with their relatively lean stack) to integrate into a big company and its stack if integration was ever a goal (not sure it was). The hassle factor in a big company is 2x to do something, and you often have 1/2 the drive / vision / motivation. I do wonder though, do folks not have super clear plans for these acquisitions? They sometimes stagnate surprisingly. We…

As with a lot of things (having done my fair share of acquisitions and also having been acquired multiple times) the plan and reality are two completely different beasts.

Oftentimes, getting the deal done is such a rush to the finish line, mixed with celebration, that making all of these grand plans a reality is someone else's problem, time to go fix the next thing. It's not logical or rational; in reality, the euphoria of closing means the real work has just begun.

One of the hardest things to do is maintain momentum after a major accomplishment - either by buying the company you so coveted, or by selling the company you built.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#34

Post by underwater »

tempnow987 wrote: post #25
aquaticsunset wrote: post #3

The 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]

It is not easy for a smaller tech company (often happy with their relatively lean stack) to integrate into a big company and its stack if integration was ever a goal (not sure it was). The hassle factor in a big company is 2x to do something, and you often have 1/2 the drive / vision / motivation. I do wonder though, do folks not have super clear plans for these acquisitions? They sometimes stagnate surprisingly. We…

I've been through an acquisition like you mention and I was shocked at how little planning our acquiring company (a big one) had done to make it successful. Once the legal and finance stuff was done there was almost zero process and structure set up to ensure we would succeed. Everything was ad hoc. We ended up in a bureaucratic environment with unrealistic expectations, trying to integrate with undocumented in-house systems, unclear goals, and almost zero support.

Instagram was an outlier as far as acquisitions go. They had 16 employees and massive momentum. Facebook was highly motivated to make the integration happen. They cherry picked strong engineers to join the Instagram team and drastically increase their engineering capacity.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#35

Post by sodality2 »

stevenharman wrote: post #30
bastawhiz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

Quoted post unavailable.

Is it a bad idea to post this under your full name?

Edit: Above content was expletive-laden sentence against anyone who dares insult Heroku

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#36

Post by nickstinemates »

Heroku changed the world, there's no metric I can fathom that you can point to and say - yep, failure.

A great deal of the movement to containers lies on the shoulders of the DevEx that Heroku pioneered.

There's a lot of new investment in a lot of new projects; it's cool to see. I hope they carry the torch forward and are successful in their own right. I am looking forward to deploying code on all of them.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#37

Post by bpeebles »

It hasn't failed. I'm not sure the final outcome of the current debacle but there's still nothing that matches Heroku. I've been using it professionally for 6+ years now and it just works more than most other things I've used.

It has its weird limitations but it's... Good. (And I've gone pretty deep into aspects of the buildpacks, how it stores its git repos on S3, and more.)

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#39

Post by dubswithus »

mfer wrote: post #24

Did Heroku fail? Heroku was the biggest in a long line of developer tools. The PaaS and now FaaS models are still alive and well. A lot of developers want them. I know people are hot on containers and k8s but devs, who need to focus on code and business logic, have poorer productivity when they have to shift into thinking about ops. Heroku inspired a lot including direct competitors (like Cloud Foundry). A lot of mon…

Agree. I like simpler. Most of my coworkers do not prefer simpler. They want to use tons of AWS services.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#40

Post by jonfleck »

anurag wrote: post #28

> If Heroku and Engine Yard were too early, we would have seen more widespread adoption of next-generation PaaS (e.g., fly.io, Render). Biased take from the founder of one of the next-generation companies mentioned: given how new Render and Fly are as companies and products, it's much more important to look at the growth in their adoption. Render's signups were already growing at a rapid pace, but more than doubled o…

Those who aren't adopting are missing out! I've been using Render for a few months now on a postgresql/next.js app and it's really good! Hopefully the new signups continue to accelerate
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