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Lots of great people there. Condolences to those impacted. It's disappointing. Elastic had it. Unforced errors abound.

nemo44x 4y ago
Yeah it’s amazing how much potential that company had and then blew it with a series of questionable business decisions. They had a ton of really quality talent too but much of it has moved on the last few years. Pretty much everything MongoDB did right, Elastic did the opposite and failed. Instead of being the best place to run Elasticsearch, one of the most popular open source projects ever, they blew all that brand equity on a series of mediocre solutions that were outcompeted.
- sthatipamala 4y ago
  Where can I read about this? I’m not familiar with their history.
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    Just look at their awful website. What do they sell? They want me to buy an Algolia competitor or something? You wouldn’t even know they are the Elasticsearch company. Go to Mongo - immediately shows me a value proposition of building software with MongoDB in their cloud. The exec leadership at Elastic is very low quality.
    - gedy 4y ago
      > You wouldn’t even know they are the Elasticsearch company. When I interviewed there a couple years ago, was told by a leader they are trying to not just be "the Elasticsearch company". (Due to competition from AWS OpenSearch)
      - nemo44x 4y ago
        I would have left the interview right there. All they did was concede Elasticsearch to AWS, a brand worth 10’s of billions. Had they executed their Elasticsearch cloud story would have been top notch and then they could put solutions behind it as additional upgrades. Instead they have a confusing story and aren’t a leader in anything they do. Just a terribly sad outcome for a company that had everything going for them.
- dbattaglia 4y ago
  As someone that worked at Elastic for 4.5 years on the Elastic Cloud team and really loved it there for the majority of that time, I saddens me to admit it but this is spot on. Despite all their best efforts, everyone I've ever spoken to just wants to run the "ELK stack" and doesn't care about their confusing solutions strategy. One thing about Elastic is that their roots are in on-prem / self-managed software and selling support to enterprise customers. This led to our cloud strategy being based around ECE (Elastic Cloud Enterprise), with the idea we would eventually fully unify this on-prem version of our Cloud product with our actual SaaS, and just run ECE "at scale". During that time we got stuck in the slower Elasticsearch "quarterly minor + monthly patch" release cycle (SaaS did have a shorter one but it was also troubled) and spent countless engineering effort troubleshooting enterprise customer's own infrastructure (imagine stuff like "ohhh, I see, you V-Motioned a server hosting ZooKeeper containers, and you're running on spinning disks" after 2 weeks+ of back and forth). We couldn't easily add table-stakes features to our SaaS because we needed it to run on-prem too, even though ECE is very limited in the types of supporting infrastructure we could add (basically just ZooKeeper and Elasticsearch). I think they are trying to move past this strategy and onto a SaaS-only K8s based approach but I fear too much time was squandered. I hope I'm proven wrong.
  - terrywang 4y ago
    Thanks for the input. Had similar experience with solution based on top of on-prem flavour (gravity - name came from pulling stuff from cloud back into traditional data centre) of k8s. Countless effort and resources have been wasted on troubleshooting customers' infrastructure rather than focusing on the real goal, get apps/APIs up and running quickly to generate value and realise goals for the business. The solution ultimately become a burden to both engineering and customers... Long sad / bad story. Fortunately, decision makes heard the voice from the field and customers, eventually offloaded the container orchestration layer (and underlying infrastructure) to managed k8s service provider, the solution is delivered as helm charts to be installed on customers' own managed k8s (EKS, AKS, GKE and OpenShift - oh, the Red Hat OpenShi(f)t is just another rabbit hole...). But again, lack of knowledge and hands-on skill operating / running k8s (not yet a commodity although it is hyped to be...) makes the journey quite turbulent from a business PoV (technically it's easy, built the skills in house, hire the right talents).
gk1 4y ago
Considering the widespread layoffs even at superb places like Stripe, I'd guess this has more to do with overhiring during "the good times" than with product-related decisions.

Yeah it’s amazing how much potential that company had and then blew it with a series of questionable business decisions. They had a ton of really quality talent too but much of it has moved on the last few years. Pretty much everything MongoDB did right, Elastic did the opposite and failed. Instead of being the best place to run Elasticsearch, one of the most popular open source projects ever, they blew all that brand equity on a series of mediocre solutions that were outcompeted.

sthatipamala 4y ago
Where can I read about this? I’m not familiar with their history.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  Just look at their awful website. What do they sell? They want me to buy an Algolia competitor or something? You wouldn’t even know they are the Elasticsearch company. Go to Mongo - immediately shows me a value proposition of building software with MongoDB in their cloud. The exec leadership at Elastic is very low quality.
  - gedy 4y ago
    > You wouldn’t even know they are the Elasticsearch company. When I interviewed there a couple years ago, was told by a leader they are trying to not just be "the Elasticsearch company". (Due to competition from AWS OpenSearch)
    - nemo44x 4y ago
      I would have left the interview right there. All they did was concede Elasticsearch to AWS, a brand worth 10’s of billions. Had they executed their Elasticsearch cloud story would have been top notch and then they could put solutions behind it as additional upgrades. Instead they have a confusing story and aren’t a leader in anything they do. Just a terribly sad outcome for a company that had everything going for them.
dbattaglia 4y ago
As someone that worked at Elastic for 4.5 years on the Elastic Cloud team and really loved it there for the majority of that time, I saddens me to admit it but this is spot on. Despite all their best efforts, everyone I've ever spoken to just wants to run the "ELK stack" and doesn't care about their confusing solutions strategy. One thing about Elastic is that their roots are in on-prem / self-managed software and selling support to enterprise customers. This led to our cloud strategy being based around ECE (Elastic Cloud Enterprise), with the idea we would eventually fully unify this on-prem version of our Cloud product with our actual SaaS, and just run ECE "at scale". During that time we got stuck in the slower Elasticsearch "quarterly minor + monthly patch" release cycle (SaaS did have a shorter one but it was also troubled) and spent countless engineering effort troubleshooting enterprise customer's own infrastructure (imagine stuff like "ohhh, I see, you V-Motioned a server hosting ZooKeeper containers, and you're running on spinning disks" after 2 weeks+ of back and forth). We couldn't easily add table-stakes features to our SaaS because we needed it to run on-prem too, even though ECE is very limited in the types of supporting infrastructure we could add (basically just ZooKeeper and Elasticsearch). I think they are trying to move past this strategy and onto a SaaS-only K8s based approach but I fear too much time was squandered. I hope I'm proven wrong.
- terrywang 4y ago
  Thanks for the input. Had similar experience with solution based on top of on-prem flavour (gravity - name came from pulling stuff from cloud back into traditional data centre) of k8s. Countless effort and resources have been wasted on troubleshooting customers' infrastructure rather than focusing on the real goal, get apps/APIs up and running quickly to generate value and realise goals for the business. The solution ultimately become a burden to both engineering and customers... Long sad / bad story. Fortunately, decision makes heard the voice from the field and customers, eventually offloaded the container orchestration layer (and underlying infrastructure) to managed k8s service provider, the solution is delivered as helm charts to be installed on customers' own managed k8s (EKS, AKS, GKE and OpenShift - oh, the Red Hat OpenShi(f)t is just another rabbit hole...). But again, lack of knowledge and hands-on skill operating / running k8s (not yet a commodity although it is hyped to be...) makes the journey quite turbulent from a business PoV (technically it's easy, built the skills in house, hire the right talents).

gk1 4y ago

Considering the widespread layoffs even at superb places like Stripe, I'd guess this has more to do with overhiring during "the good times" than with product-related decisions.