3 ms·

IF we want to take them at face-value that this is because of fraud and abuse (a trust/respect they have not earned IMHO, or rather they lost many years ago) th

IF we want to take them at face-value that this is because of fraud and abuse (a trust/respect they have not earned IMHO, or rather they lost many years ago) then this a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Otherwise it's some stupid MBA finding a way to save some money which will ultimately only speed up Heroku's demise. Either way the writing is on the wall. The Heroku that delighted us all is long dead and the product is on life support at this point to eek some more money from people who haven't already moved on to greener pastures. It's really say to be honest, Heroku felt like magic and was amazing for a number of years and then just stopped being relevant, coasted, and hemorrhaged talent. The downfall started before Salesforce IIRC but at this point it's clear the heart of Heroku is dead and gone. I'm sure the other PaaS that have innovated, moved with the times (fly.io/render/etc) are popping bottles today at this news.

shostack 4y ago
I don't understand this sentiment sometimes. There may be fraud and abuse. There may also be a material cost to a company whose detailed financial situation I'm assuming you are not purvey to. Someone doesn't need to be "a stupid MBA" to have made this decision (in fact my guess would be it involved many cross functional and leadership perspectives given its nature). Also, this is quite possibly something necessary for the future continued health of the business and the jobs it supports. If so, I'd consider it anything but stupid.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  Salesforce made 4.34B in gross profit in 2021, they aren't hurting for money and the "health of the business" seems perfectly fine. I'm sure someone got a raise for cutting this program, it will save the company some money in the short term, and that person will have left to screw up another company before the chickens come home to roost. It's a tale as old as time and something we've seen enough times to notice the signs.
  - ubertaco 4y ago
    This is Salesforce we're talking about, the company that pledged not to do any layoffs during the pandemic, then announced that they were laying off 1000 people literally the day after announcing what they called "the best quarter in company history." [0] Worst of all? Many of the people who worked at Salesforce found out they were laid off _by reading the news article_ (source: I worked at Salesforce at the time, and there was a _lot_ of commotion internally to try to track down which managers had the audacity to give the laid-off employees advance notice before the public announcement, and lots of internal all-hands-meeting outrage directed at people who dared to "break trust" by telling reporters that they had been laid off). [0] https://abcnews.go.com/Business/salesforce-announces-layoffs-quarterly-revenue-tops-billion/story?id=72650370 https://abcnews.go.com/Business/salesforce-announces-layoffs...
- nebula8804 4y ago
  MBAs have destroyed the US/Europe. How? Outsourcing all the jobs/manufacturing to China. This caused so many knock on effects. Some include an angry unemployed population electing Trump/other populists, the west being caught with its pants down during COVID when things we needed could not be obtained from China...many others as well. Then subsequently after all the manufacturing jobs were outsourced the next thing to be outsourced was R&D(to suppliers). For example: Car companies shutting down one division after another and just relying on suppliers. Ford used to have in house seat development, their own metallurgical teams etc. All of it outsourced to suppliers who are trying to spread out their costs so everyone gets the bare minimum because all of the fundamental tooling is reused for every customer. The MBA dream was to outsource everything including manufacturing and just stick a badge on the finished car at the end. It is a cancer that has permeated a lot of western business(so many MBA grads have to go somewhere right? They ended up at almost every company regardless of industry) We are finally starting to swing back to pre-MBA. Tesla for example was criticized heavily for doing things like bringing seat manufacturing in house. They understood that everything a user touches and feels should be in house profound knowledge and I believe it is benefiting them in terms of customer satisfaction. Furthermore material science knowledge sharing with SpaceX is very exciting to see and will hopefully increase innovation in the industry. Its not only Tesla, small business is turning the ship around as well. Another example is Origin USA. They wanted to bring back jiu jitsu gis manufacturing but discovered that most industrial looms were rusting away or shipped overseas. They found one loom in Maine and pulled the old guys who knew how to run it out of retirement to help teach a new young generation to slowly start bringing that experience and capability back into the US. A lot of profound knowledge has been lost. People forget that technology and what we enjoy does not magically come out of nowhere. It requires sustained effort and on the ground knowledge that has to be maintained or it will be lost.
  - donmcronald 4y ago
    > A lot of profound knowledge has been lost. People forget that technology and what we enjoy does not magically come out of nowhere. It requires sustained effort and on the ground knowledge that has to be maintained or it will be lost. This is something that I wish people would understand when it comes to the right-to-repair movement. For example, if nothing changes, in a couple of generations the only knowledge that will exist for repairing farm machinery will be dictated by manufacturers and will only include processes that are profitable for those manufacturers. The worst outcome would be one with parts serialization and keys that are controlled by a foreign country. A really good example that shows the importance of independent knowledge is board level laptop repair. Until I watched Rossman's YouTube channel I though a bad motherboard was unrepairable. Then, after a bit of watching, I started to realize there are a lot of repairs that are practical, but the knowledge has almost been wiped out by large manufacturers that benefit from whole part or whole machine replacement rather than repair.
- N_A_T_E 4y ago
  Someone doesn't need to be "a stupid MBA" to have made this decision They might not have an MBA but it seems like a "bean counter" sort of decision. Maybe it's easier to just blame the MBAs than assess the whole leadership team's motives when we see short sighted strategies that improve profitability today and kill the product's ecosystem in the long term. I'm getting flashbacks of the Boeing documentary just writing this.
- countspongebob 4y ago
  Thanks Shostack. As it happens, I don't have an MBA, but I have considered in the past as I think it is important for people who come up through the engineering ranks to GM jobs to be well rounded. Instead I've done a lot of learning on the job, which also works.
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  I think you mean "privy to."
duxup 4y ago
Is it possible that a bunch of free stuff where they don't sell you as a product (and maybe even when they do sometimes) just isn't a viable thing to do on the web? Generally on the web we as consumers seem to cycle through these companies, often pay nothing, and we're bummed each time they quit doing the thing... Seems like a pattern.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  It's possible, though that doesn't really apply to a company who made $4.34B in gross profit in 2021. I'm sure they will save some money but by making this move they are signalling (intentionally or not) that Heroku is on life support and they don't care about developers anymore.
  - duxup 4y ago
    They didn't make much of that money from Heroku I bet.
    - joshstrange 4y ago
      Obviously they didn't make that much on Heroku but they don't report per-division numbers as far as I could find, just top-level. My point is they have the money to invest in Heroku if they wanted to. To combat fraud/abuse, to breathe some life into it, to respond to security events quicker, to innovate, to be competitive. They've done none of those things and instead are cutting off the last funnel of people who "choose" to use their platform. That tells me they don't care about Heroku as anything more than "Salesforce Cloud" something people almost have to use rather than choose.
      - duxup 4y ago
        They have money to invest. And so do other companies offering free products and yet they often vanish. Heroku is not new, they got investment ... maybe this whole cycle of free tier companies just isn't working?
donmcronald 4y ago
IMO the big winners in this space will be the ones that provide feature parity in self-hosted runtimes (meant for dev and testing) in addition to consumption based entry level plans. If the appeal of all these systems is horizontal scalability on managed infrastructure, is there much harm in giving away a free local runtime that's vertically scalable with no HA or SLA? The incremental cost for me to self-host something like that is pretty low (near $0) and the benefit of having a non-revocable, free forever runtime for dev deployments has a lot of value (to me). I create a lot of throw away projects to learn and being able to keep them runnable for the long term is useful if I want to go back and reference them / re-learn something. I also think a consumption based entry level offering is a good option to reduce abuse. If I'm a hobbyist sized user I can use my existing self-hosted resources for dev and testing and the cost of using the paid service is going to be low for me, but can cover costs for the infrastructure provider. I know it's viewed at untenable, but I'd gladly take a community only / per-incident support offering at that level to keep the costs low.
swatcoder 4y ago
- joshstrange 4y ago
  It comes from a lifetime of watching leaders/visionaries sell their companies to corporations that don't care about anything but the bottom line (to be specific the short-term bottom line) who then proceed to run the company into the ground because they don't "get" the company. I'm not sure how many times you had to see that phenomenon to recognize the patterns but it's pretty clear to me. It also comes from being a former user of Heroku and being ennammered by it for years until they stopped innovating. Today's move means I will never touch it again. Do I know all the internal stats? No but I'll say 2 things: 1. Salesforce made over $4B in gross profit in 2021, they aren't hurting for money. 2. Heroku's failures are due to poor leadership and being completely surpassed by their competitors. #1 means they have the money to invest in Heroku but are choosing not to and #2 is due to a decade of mismanagement. Now they want to stop some of the bleeding by cutting off the free tier, the problem is they are also guaranteeing they won't ever recapture developer mindshare in the future. Saves some money today but destroys the future of the product (as a developer platform at least, I'm sure it will go on to be Salesforce Cloud or something like that which people only use because they have to).
- jacooper 4y ago
  Isn't this against HN rules?
jrochkind1 4y ago
> The downfall started before Salesforce Salesforce purchased heroku in Dec 2010. This was before, for instance, ruby creator Matz was an employee (he no longer is). Heroku had only existed for about 2 years when salesforce bought it. I think there are some other features we think of as core to heroku that actually weren't deployed until after the salesforce purchase. I think a lot of people remember it this way, but I think they are wrong and heroku's golden age actually came a couple years after the salesforce acquisition.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  I apologize for mixing up my timelines. I guess I thought they had a longer run before SF bought them. I still believe Heroku was horribly managed under SF and they must have had at least some of that stuff in the pipeline before being bought. I always give a few years of time after acquisition before I consider something to be due to the company that bought them (and not just existing work/ideas from the previous leadership). With a lot of companies like it it feels like the passion/energy just dies after acquisition (not immediately but in a relatively short period of time), which feels like what happened with Heroku. They went from being an HN darling to hearing next to nothing about them until their security issues earlier this year.

shostack 4y ago

I don't understand this sentiment sometimes. There may be fraud and abuse. There may also be a material cost to a company whose detailed financial situation I'm assuming you are not purvey to. Someone doesn't need to be "a stupid MBA" to have made this decision (in fact my guess would be it involved many cross functional and leadership perspectives given its nature). Also, this is quite possibly something necessary for the future continued health of the business and the jobs it supports. If so, I'd consider it anything but stupid.

joshstrange 4y ago
Salesforce made 4.34B in gross profit in 2021, they aren't hurting for money and the "health of the business" seems perfectly fine. I'm sure someone got a raise for cutting this program, it will save the company some money in the short term, and that person will have left to screw up another company before the chickens come home to roost. It's a tale as old as time and something we've seen enough times to notice the signs.
- ubertaco 4y ago
  This is Salesforce we're talking about, the company that pledged not to do any layoffs during the pandemic, then announced that they were laying off 1000 people literally the day after announcing what they called "the best quarter in company history." [0] Worst of all? Many of the people who worked at Salesforce found out they were laid off _by reading the news article_ (source: I worked at Salesforce at the time, and there was a _lot_ of commotion internally to try to track down which managers had the audacity to give the laid-off employees advance notice before the public announcement, and lots of internal all-hands-meeting outrage directed at people who dared to "break trust" by telling reporters that they had been laid off). [0] https://abcnews.go.com/Business/salesforce-announces-layoffs-quarterly-revenue-tops-billion/story?id=72650370 https://abcnews.go.com/Business/salesforce-announces-layoffs...
nebula8804 4y ago
MBAs have destroyed the US/Europe. How? Outsourcing all the jobs/manufacturing to China. This caused so many knock on effects. Some include an angry unemployed population electing Trump/other populists, the west being caught with its pants down during COVID when things we needed could not be obtained from China...many others as well. Then subsequently after all the manufacturing jobs were outsourced the next thing to be outsourced was R&D(to suppliers). For example: Car companies shutting down one division after another and just relying on suppliers. Ford used to have in house seat development, their own metallurgical teams etc. All of it outsourced to suppliers who are trying to spread out their costs so everyone gets the bare minimum because all of the fundamental tooling is reused for every customer. The MBA dream was to outsource everything including manufacturing and just stick a badge on the finished car at the end. It is a cancer that has permeated a lot of western business(so many MBA grads have to go somewhere right? They ended up at almost every company regardless of industry) We are finally starting to swing back to pre-MBA. Tesla for example was criticized heavily for doing things like bringing seat manufacturing in house. They understood that everything a user touches and feels should be in house profound knowledge and I believe it is benefiting them in terms of customer satisfaction. Furthermore material science knowledge sharing with SpaceX is very exciting to see and will hopefully increase innovation in the industry. Its not only Tesla, small business is turning the ship around as well. Another example is Origin USA. They wanted to bring back jiu jitsu gis manufacturing but discovered that most industrial looms were rusting away or shipped overseas. They found one loom in Maine and pulled the old guys who knew how to run it out of retirement to help teach a new young generation to slowly start bringing that experience and capability back into the US. A lot of profound knowledge has been lost. People forget that technology and what we enjoy does not magically come out of nowhere. It requires sustained effort and on the ground knowledge that has to be maintained or it will be lost.
- donmcronald 4y ago
  > A lot of profound knowledge has been lost. People forget that technology and what we enjoy does not magically come out of nowhere. It requires sustained effort and on the ground knowledge that has to be maintained or it will be lost. This is something that I wish people would understand when it comes to the right-to-repair movement. For example, if nothing changes, in a couple of generations the only knowledge that will exist for repairing farm machinery will be dictated by manufacturers and will only include processes that are profitable for those manufacturers. The worst outcome would be one with parts serialization and keys that are controlled by a foreign country. A really good example that shows the importance of independent knowledge is board level laptop repair. Until I watched Rossman's YouTube channel I though a bad motherboard was unrepairable. Then, after a bit of watching, I started to realize there are a lot of repairs that are practical, but the knowledge has almost been wiped out by large manufacturers that benefit from whole part or whole machine replacement rather than repair.
N_A_T_E 4y ago
Someone doesn't need to be "a stupid MBA" to have made this decision They might not have an MBA but it seems like a "bean counter" sort of decision. Maybe it's easier to just blame the MBAs than assess the whole leadership team's motives when we see short sighted strategies that improve profitability today and kill the product's ecosystem in the long term. I'm getting flashbacks of the Boeing documentary just writing this.
countspongebob 4y ago
Thanks Shostack. As it happens, I don't have an MBA, but I have considered in the past as I think it is important for people who come up through the engineering ranks to GM jobs to be well rounded. Instead I've done a lot of learning on the job, which also works.
nathanaldensr 4y ago
I think you mean "privy to."

duxup 4y ago

Is it possible that a bunch of free stuff where they don't sell you as a product (and maybe even when they do sometimes) just isn't a viable thing to do on the web? Generally on the web we as consumers seem to cycle through these companies, often pay nothing, and we're bummed each time they quit doing the thing... Seems like a pattern.

joshstrange 4y ago
It's possible, though that doesn't really apply to a company who made $4.34B in gross profit in 2021. I'm sure they will save some money but by making this move they are signalling (intentionally or not) that Heroku is on life support and they don't care about developers anymore.
- duxup 4y ago
  They didn't make much of that money from Heroku I bet.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    Obviously they didn't make that much on Heroku but they don't report per-division numbers as far as I could find, just top-level. My point is they have the money to invest in Heroku if they wanted to. To combat fraud/abuse, to breathe some life into it, to respond to security events quicker, to innovate, to be competitive. They've done none of those things and instead are cutting off the last funnel of people who "choose" to use their platform. That tells me they don't care about Heroku as anything more than "Salesforce Cloud" something people almost have to use rather than choose.
    - duxup 4y ago
      They have money to invest. And so do other companies offering free products and yet they often vanish. Heroku is not new, they got investment ... maybe this whole cycle of free tier companies just isn't working?

donmcronald 4y ago

IMO the big winners in this space will be the ones that provide feature parity in self-hosted runtimes (meant for dev and testing) in addition to consumption based entry level plans. If the appeal of all these systems is horizontal scalability on managed infrastructure, is there much harm in giving away a free local runtime that's vertically scalable with no HA or SLA? The incremental cost for me to self-host something like that is pretty low (near $0) and the benefit of having a non-revocable, free forever runtime for dev deployments has a lot of value (to me). I create a lot of throw away projects to learn and being able to keep them runnable for the long term is useful if I want to go back and reference them / re-learn something. I also think a consumption based entry level offering is a good option to reduce abuse. If I'm a hobbyist sized user I can use my existing self-hosted resources for dev and testing and the cost of using the paid service is going to be low for me, but can cover costs for the infrastructure provider. I know it's viewed at untenable, but I'd gladly take a community only / per-incident support offering at that level to keep the costs low.

swatcoder 4y ago

joshstrange 4y ago
It comes from a lifetime of watching leaders/visionaries sell their companies to corporations that don't care about anything but the bottom line (to be specific the short-term bottom line) who then proceed to run the company into the ground because they don't "get" the company. I'm not sure how many times you had to see that phenomenon to recognize the patterns but it's pretty clear to me. It also comes from being a former user of Heroku and being ennammered by it for years until they stopped innovating. Today's move means I will never touch it again. Do I know all the internal stats? No but I'll say 2 things: 1. Salesforce made over $4B in gross profit in 2021, they aren't hurting for money. 2. Heroku's failures are due to poor leadership and being completely surpassed by their competitors. #1 means they have the money to invest in Heroku but are choosing not to and #2 is due to a decade of mismanagement. Now they want to stop some of the bleeding by cutting off the free tier, the problem is they are also guaranteeing they won't ever recapture developer mindshare in the future. Saves some money today but destroys the future of the product (as a developer platform at least, I'm sure it will go on to be Salesforce Cloud or something like that which people only use because they have to).
jacooper 4y ago
Isn't this against HN rules?

jrochkind1 4y ago

> The downfall started before Salesforce Salesforce purchased heroku in Dec 2010. This was before, for instance, ruby creator Matz was an employee (he no longer is). Heroku had only existed for about 2 years when salesforce bought it. I think there are some other features we think of as core to heroku that actually weren't deployed until after the salesforce purchase. I think a lot of people remember it this way, but I think they are wrong and heroku's golden age actually came a couple years after the salesforce acquisition.

joshstrange 4y ago
I apologize for mixing up my timelines. I guess I thought they had a longer run before SF bought them. I still believe Heroku was horribly managed under SF and they must have had at least some of that stuff in the pipeline before being bought. I always give a few years of time after acquisition before I consider something to be due to the company that bought them (and not just existing work/ideas from the previous leadership). With a lot of companies like it it feels like the passion/energy just dies after acquisition (not immediately but in a relatively short period of time), which feels like what happened with Heroku. They went from being an HN darling to hearing next to nothing about them until their security issues earlier this year.