Why did Heroku fail? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#71

Post by craigkerstiens » Sat, May 14, 2022, 1:49 AM UTC

hthrowaway5 wrote: post #68

ilaksh wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's different. Heroku itself was a massive success. The Salesforce management completely screwed up the department after the acquisition. That's on Salesforce not Heroku. Heroku left the building already.

Agreed. Heroku was an incredible success but using it in 2022 would be downright negligence. (Although I would argue that Salesforce was also responsible for creating most of what we love about Heroku. That acquisition happened far earlier than people realize. They're also almost entirely responsible for its downfall.) EDIT: Craig is right below (and he pretty much always is). When I said "created" I really meant in…

That Salesforce created it was wrong. That Heroku was already that way, yes also re-painting history. Cedar and buildpacks were conceived before the acquisition but launched after. The teams were allowed to continue executing on roadmaps for multiple years after the acquisition, but Salesforce could be viewed more like a series b, c, d round than in a way influencing the roadmap and making it happen.

GitHub is an amazing parallel, folks feel that Microsoft turned around GitHub, but actions and much of the GitHub turn around happened long before the acquisition. Those sort of things take years, you should mostly try to judge a top down influence 4-6 years after they were there.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#72

Post by iratewizard » Sat, May 14, 2022, 1:54 AM UTC

tpmx wrote: post #8

Salesforce also owns Slack... Is this a preview of what will happen to it?

Probably not. I personally think their bet that a slack-first user experience where the internal Salesforce experience takes a back seat is a game changer. If executed right, nobody will be able to catch up at all. We all know how bad Microsoft teams and whatever Google's chat of the year is.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#73

Post by xcskier56 » Sat, May 14, 2022, 2:05 AM UTC

It didn’t fail for me. If hosting my first app/mvp hadn’t been so simple, I’m not sure I would have kept going down the software development path; and for that, I’m incredibly grateful.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#74

Post by gtirloni » Sat, May 14, 2022, 2:13 AM UTC

Since when Heroku failed? It's one of those articles that maybe went too extreme with clickbait title that's so off-putting that I don't even bother to open.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#75

Post by barbecue_sauce » Sat, May 14, 2022, 2:15 AM UTC

2c2c2c wrote: post #22

i started at a company as engineer #1 and my first task was to take an outsourced MVP built on heroku, port it from ruby to python, and make it work on aws. there was seemingly no logical reason to do any of this-- the product was at an early stage with nearly no traffic. even if the product were to become immensely successful, the traffic would probably never require more than a single box. but none of this seemed t…

You can't run Ruby on AWS?

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#76

Post by lewisjoe » Sat, May 14, 2022, 2:16 AM UTC

Early user here. One of the very first apps I ever built ran on heroku. Thanks for that experience. Heroku taught me deployments can be a single day effort during a time when I didn't even know deployments usually are more difficult than that. I'm just grateful Heroku existed at that point of my life :)

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#77

Post by kdazzle » Sat, May 14, 2022, 2:16 AM UTC

craigkerstiens wrote: post #71

hthrowaway5 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Heroku was an incredible success but using it in 2022 would be downright negligence. (Although I would argue that Salesforce was also responsible for creating most of what we love about Heroku. That acquisition happened far earlier than people realize. They're also almost entirely responsible for its downfall.) EDIT: Craig is right below (and he pretty much always is). When I said "created" I really meant in…

That Salesforce created it was wrong. That Heroku was already that way, yes also re-painting history. Cedar and buildpacks were conceived before the acquisition but launched after. The teams were allowed to continue executing on roadmaps for multiple years after the acquisition, but Salesforce could be viewed more like a series b, c, d round than in a way influencing the roadmap and making it happen. GitHub is an ama…

> [Github A]ctions and much of the GitHub turn around happened long before the acquisition

Interesting - someone at either MS or Github told me that the Azure DevOps team moved over to GitHub to create Actions. But maybe I misheard or both versions are true.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#78

Post by craigkerstiens » Sat, May 14, 2022, 2:20 AM UTC

kdazzle wrote: post #77

craigkerstiens wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Salesforce created it was wrong. That Heroku was already that way, yes also re-painting history. Cedar and buildpacks were conceived before the acquisition but launched after. The teams were allowed to continue executing on roadmaps for multiple years after the acquisition, but Salesforce could be viewed more like a series b, c, d round than in a way influencing the roadmap and making it happen. GitHub is an ama…

> [Github A]ctions and much of the GitHub turn around happened long before the acquisition Interesting - someone at either MS or Github told me that the Azure DevOps team moved over to GitHub to create Actions. But maybe I misheard or both versions are true.

Yeah, not sure how much I can say, but this is definitely a repainting of reality. Actions at least the vision of what it would/could be was before acquisition.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#79

Post by kdazzle » Sat, May 14, 2022, 2:20 AM UTC

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…

> Salesforce is not particularly focused on integrated acquired products - its interested in selling them largely as is to existing customers

Definitely true, but SF is extremely interested in marketing its unintegrated products as fully integrated.

See for example: SF marketing cloud, where the only integration is an iframe for your SF session and a fresh branded subdomain (mc.exacttarget.com chefs kiss)

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#80

Post by listenallyall » Sat, May 14, 2022, 2:44 AM UTC

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 "…

> Render, fly, even Netlify

Pretty sure none of these can run any JVM applications. Heroku can, very easily.