In my experience, generally Salesforce takes a little while before they notice that they bought you and start imposing uniformity and forcibly regressing you to their mean.
This was a(n internally-)famously hard and lengthy process for them with ExactTarget (read: Marketing Cloud) because ExactTarget employees identified strongly with "ExactTarget orange" culture rather than "Salesforce blue", which mostly meant being appalled at the technical and process swamp that Salesforce represented and pushing hard to keep their own tech stack and their own culture and standards as long as possible.
Heroku had an interesting arc, as they were the bright spot people would point at internally as where actually good engineering somehow happene even at Salesforce. There was a whole effort to let Heroku be the business unit that paved the path to AWS and PaaS for the entire company (which was at the time operating datacenters themselves), and so Heroku got a bunch of investment and freedom for a bit.
Then there was some weird power struggle, and the executives inexplicably decided not only to take that out of Heroku's hands despite their expertise, but also to basically shove Heroku in a corner to be ignored unless stripmined of its customer base through upsells or its staff through reallocations of headcount.
It’s just in coma, slowly dying away on a respirator. Some relatives irrationally keep paying the hospital to keep the patient alive, but the doctors just wait until they can finally pull the plugs and use the bed for someone with actual chances of survival.
I think the downhill slide started when they introduced the "Private Space Peering". It is a wrapper on top of AWS VPC, but it was something like $1000 a month several years ago. It also was gating larger instances and other important features.
So few people used it. I guess this provided a negative signal to their management about the adoption rate of new features. And then everything eventually just died.
Strong disagree. They didn’t even invent buildpacks until 2011, the year after the acquisition.
Momentum??
If they still had momentum one year after acquisition, I think it's hard to say they have been going downhill
Maybe we could say they went uphill instead for a while? Or something
In my experience, generally Salesforce takes a little while before they notice that they bought you and start imposing uniformity and forcibly regressing you to their mean.
This was a(n internally-)famously hard and lengthy process for them with ExactTarget (read: Marketing Cloud) because ExactTarget employees identified strongly with "ExactTarget orange" culture rather than "Salesforce blue", which mostly meant being appalled at the technical and process swamp that Salesforce represented and pushing hard to keep their own tech stack and their own culture and standards as long as possible.
Heroku had an interesting arc, as they were the bright spot people would point at internally as where actually good engineering somehow happene even at Salesforce. There was a whole effort to let Heroku be the business unit that paved the path to AWS and PaaS for the entire company (which was at the time operating datacenters themselves), and so Heroku got a bunch of investment and freedom for a bit.
Then there was some weird power struggle, and the executives inexplicably decided not only to take that out of Heroku's hands despite their expertise, but also to basically shove Heroku in a corner to be ignored unless stripmined of its customer base through upsells or its staff through reallocations of headcount.
Actually the opposite: they came into their prime after the acquisition. Probably not due to Salesforce, but still.
I can't believe that it has been over 15 years ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1982489
It’s just in coma, slowly dying away on a respirator. Some relatives irrationally keep paying the hospital to keep the patient alive, but the doctors just wait until they can finally pull the plugs and use the bed for someone with actual chances of survival.
I think the downhill slide started when they introduced the "Private Space Peering". It is a wrapper on top of AWS VPC, but it was something like $1000 a month several years ago. It also was gating larger instances and other important features.
So few people used it. I guess this provided a negative signal to their management about the adoption rate of new features. And then everything eventually just died.