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I predict that Meteor will won't go anywhere in 2016. I know this sounds negative so I'll try to explain. The surface area of Meteor is still too large. Keep in

I predict that Meteor will won't go anywhere in 2016. I know this sounds negative so I'll try to explain. The surface area of Meteor is still too large. Keep in mind this is a venture backed company, people are getting big salaries to work on a framework. Look at what it's led to: in house tools like Blaze which even the creators are already tired of. At best Meteor will be 90% cannibalized and replaced with open source tools (as this blog post is implying), and sit properly in the same place as other CMSes, which inherently don't get that popular. What's worrying about this post in particular is it's not business focused, and the only long term company goal mentioned is "meteor will be a back end solution that makes sense." To what end? Why wouldn't you do that in a non-profit or pure open source model?

forax 11y ago
Part of the reason this year has been a bit of a mess is because MDG has been focusing a lot of resources on the profit-generating component of their business: meteor hosting and support. They launched Galaxy (their hosting service) just a couple months ago so it's still too early to say how successful that will be, but it could easily be in their best interests to cannibalize some of their older features if it helps to grow their userbase. For example, not having to spend developer resources on Blaze might enable them to get SQL support out the door sooner. I'm cautiously optimistic for them but wouldn't be too surprised either if they were still struggling next year.
- joshowens 11y ago
  Not having to spend money on Blaze will make them more competitive as a hosting business. Frankly, when is the last time you saw a billion dollar unicorn hosting business? Or a hosting IPO? I doubt we will see SQL support. We will likely see something with GraphQL instead.
  - jbigelow76 11y ago
    > Frankly, when is the last time you saw a billion dollar unicorn hosting business? Depends on how nitpicky one wants to be differentiating a colo from a managed host, but IBM purchased Softlayer for $2 billion back in 2013.
  - ollerac 11y ago
    Digital Ocean is also getting there, started in 2011, currently valued at $683 million.
  - SwellJoe 11y ago
    Heroku is probably the closest case study, in that they started as (and mostly remained in the popular conscience) a Ruby on Rails host. I believe they sold for $200+ million. Not a "unicorn", but not a small exit, for such a short period of time. They were only around as an independent company for a few years.
  - forax 11y ago
    As a developer who is only using them for a personal project so far, I don't care one way or the other if they are incapable of becoming a unicorn - I just want them to be profitable enough to continue developing the framework. They may be under too much pressure from their investors to go that route, but wasn't hosting MDG's monetization plan from the beginning? If so, savvy investors would already know the likelihood of unicornization was low/zero when they invested. You're certainly much more in the loop about SQL/GraphQL. Would GraphQL allow non-mongo databases to push updates out to clients for reactive updates? Thanks for running Crater.io - I've been reading it a lot recently!
joshowens 11y ago
Why would the post be business focused? The guy that wrote it doesn't run "Meteor the business", he just loves the framework itself. I am not even sure how a CMS got mentioned and compared here.
- faceyspacey 11y ago
  Meteor has as a better chance than ever, ESPECIALLY if 90% of what you can do in Meteor you can do in "bare metal" NPM! Meteor doesn't have to provide that many "features" to win over the NPM crowd that it has struggled to acquire thus far. It's so damn complex to implement all this stuff that most developers need help doing it. Meteor's problem thus far has been it makes it easy but provides no way to "drop down" to a lower level and configure things like you would on "bare metal" NPM!!!! Despite its easiness, this has scared away many developers from Meteor--especially the expert developers who would otherwise evangelize once they joined Meteor. Therefore, Meteor just needs to provide a way to BOTH do things with sufficiently less boilerplate (like it's always done well), but also allow you to drop down to make lower level tweaks as you would on "bare metal" NPM. And perhaps even an intermediate tier in between for some features. For example, Relay + GraphQL is great but there should be the "beginner's way to Relay." So the killer feature in fact isn't a "feature" in the traditional sense, but rather a mechanism that only a full stack framework could provide. Being the only full stack framework that matters (and the only "reactive full stack framework" in existence), Meteor is well positioned to scoop up the entire NPM market if it plays its cards right!
  - qaq 11y ago
    Unless this comment is from SMM team at Meteor, WTF? What is NPM market :)? "Bare metal" npm? Name single sizable project that uses Meteor? You do realise that for 90% of enterprise projects it's a wrong tool. There is no usable universial/isomorphic option, you can't expose API for external consumption, if you have to consume services on the backend the only cool feature that Meteor has is gone. Not to mention long term risks of what will happen to the project when vc funding runs out.
    - 11y ago

forax 11y ago

Part of the reason this year has been a bit of a mess is because MDG has been focusing a lot of resources on the profit-generating component of their business: meteor hosting and support. They launched Galaxy (their hosting service) just a couple months ago so it's still too early to say how successful that will be, but it could easily be in their best interests to cannibalize some of their older features if it helps to grow their userbase. For example, not having to spend developer resources on Blaze might enable them to get SQL support out the door sooner. I'm cautiously optimistic for them but wouldn't be too surprised either if they were still struggling next year.

joshowens 11y ago
Not having to spend money on Blaze will make them more competitive as a hosting business. Frankly, when is the last time you saw a billion dollar unicorn hosting business? Or a hosting IPO? I doubt we will see SQL support. We will likely see something with GraphQL instead.
- jbigelow76 11y ago
  > Frankly, when is the last time you saw a billion dollar unicorn hosting business? Depends on how nitpicky one wants to be differentiating a colo from a managed host, but IBM purchased Softlayer for $2 billion back in 2013.
- ollerac 11y ago
  Digital Ocean is also getting there, started in 2011, currently valued at $683 million.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  Heroku is probably the closest case study, in that they started as (and mostly remained in the popular conscience) a Ruby on Rails host. I believe they sold for $200+ million. Not a "unicorn", but not a small exit, for such a short period of time. They were only around as an independent company for a few years.
- forax 11y ago
  As a developer who is only using them for a personal project so far, I don't care one way or the other if they are incapable of becoming a unicorn - I just want them to be profitable enough to continue developing the framework. They may be under too much pressure from their investors to go that route, but wasn't hosting MDG's monetization plan from the beginning? If so, savvy investors would already know the likelihood of unicornization was low/zero when they invested. You're certainly much more in the loop about SQL/GraphQL. Would GraphQL allow non-mongo databases to push updates out to clients for reactive updates? Thanks for running Crater.io - I've been reading it a lot recently!

joshowens 11y ago

Why would the post be business focused? The guy that wrote it doesn't run "Meteor the business", he just loves the framework itself. I am not even sure how a CMS got mentioned and compared here.

faceyspacey 11y ago
Meteor has as a better chance than ever, ESPECIALLY if 90% of what you can do in Meteor you can do in "bare metal" NPM! Meteor doesn't have to provide that many "features" to win over the NPM crowd that it has struggled to acquire thus far. It's so damn complex to implement all this stuff that most developers need help doing it. Meteor's problem thus far has been it makes it easy but provides no way to "drop down" to a lower level and configure things like you would on "bare metal" NPM!!!! Despite its easiness, this has scared away many developers from Meteor--especially the expert developers who would otherwise evangelize once they joined Meteor. Therefore, Meteor just needs to provide a way to BOTH do things with sufficiently less boilerplate (like it's always done well), but also allow you to drop down to make lower level tweaks as you would on "bare metal" NPM. And perhaps even an intermediate tier in between for some features. For example, Relay + GraphQL is great but there should be the "beginner's way to Relay." So the killer feature in fact isn't a "feature" in the traditional sense, but rather a mechanism that only a full stack framework could provide. Being the only full stack framework that matters (and the only "reactive full stack framework" in existence), Meteor is well positioned to scoop up the entire NPM market if it plays its cards right!
- qaq 11y ago
  Unless this comment is from SMM team at Meteor, WTF? What is NPM market :)? "Bare metal" npm? Name single sizable project that uses Meteor? You do realise that for 90% of enterprise projects it's a wrong tool. There is no usable universial/isomorphic option, you can't expose API for external consumption, if you have to consume services on the backend the only cool feature that Meteor has is gone. Not to mention long term risks of what will happen to the project when vc funding runs out.
  - 11y ago