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Why did Heroku fail?

matt-rickard.com

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Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#21

Post by throwaway427 »

throwawaysfdc wrote: post #9
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 "…

> 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.

Since you seem to have some insight into this, I interviewed a former Heroku eng a while back and he said that they deploy Heroku infra on Heroku, essentially dogfooding their own product. I also see a lot of claims that Heroku has essentially stagnated on features. I'm curious how do internal teams reconcile this (do they just work around the stagnation?) and is there a layer that is a choke point for product improvement that also affects to internal teams (if so that would seem demoralizing)?

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#22

Post by 2c2c2c »

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 to matter. nor did the considerable amount of time making things just work. the ceo, who was at one point a technical engineer mind you, just wanted to be able to say his stuff ran on aws

situations like this are probably more common than you would think. it's purely a brand recognition thing for them

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#23

Post by gkoberger »

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?

I wouldn't say it failed yet, but the writing is on the wall. GitHub Sync has been down for over a month and they think all API keys leaked and... it seems nobody cares. Communication is at a minimum, the UI is broken, we have no clue if our API keys were leaked, etc.

It's clear nobody at Heroku cares anymore.

(For the record, I loved Heroku and still do. This makes me so sad. I'd love to see Salesforce spin it off somehow, rather than slowly letting it suffocate.)

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#24

Post by mfer »

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 money has been made and people jobs make easier.

On the flip side, I keep seeing businesses not wanting to invest in developer tools that make their lives easier. PaaS is one of them. Did Salesforce fail to invest in Heroku so it stagnated? How many other places is this happening? Did Heroku make enough money and that was it?

There are a lot of unknowns.

I think we need more PaaS and FaaS. Make the jobs of developers simpler (hiding the ops complexity).

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#25

Post by tempnow987 »

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 used a smallish product (maybe 5K/year) they get acquired, they dropped a key feature and replaced it with a paid but not compatible / worse feature, then reached out with a sales person to talk about why we weren't using it and rolled our own replacement. I mean, huh? Of all the strategies this was going to be it?

Instagram a notable exception here.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#26

Post by subpixel »

The author hints more than once at unfulfilled OpenShift potential. I’m not familiar with anything that OpenShift set out to do but failed to realize. Genuinely curious.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#27

Post by pan69 »

tschellenbach wrote: post #10
njudah wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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

Isn't the elephant in the room then; why did Salesforce buy Heroku?

I mean:

> From a strategy POV, for better or worse, Salesforce is not particularly focused on integrated acquired products

> I heard revenue and margins weren't sustainable prior to the acquisition

What was the point of the aquisition? To let it die?

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#28

Post by anurag »

> 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 overnight after the Heroku incident; give us a couple more years before judging adoption!

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#29

Post by phphphphp »

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…

Do you have a source for the earnings figures? I can’t find anything — Heroku generating hundreds of millions a year feels like something that would be surfaced in the Salesforce financials.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#30

Post by stevenharman »

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 "…

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