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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

The lowest grade I got in my business degree was Information Systems. The reason I got that grade is that I made a case for in-sourcing development based on my personal experience, where we provide services for cheaper than consultants, that aligns with OUR business processes.

The only answer to any and all business IT questions in non-IT companies is to outsource. The reasoning is that it is considered a support activity on Porter's value chain, and as such should be cut cut cut cut cut cut and cut some more.

Hilariously we're also taught to adopt best-of-breed software for ERPs, CRMs, and SCM tools AND CHANGE OUR BUSINESS PROCESSES TO MATCH THE SOFTWARE. You know, like Target did when they moved to Canada, adopted SAP, and ended up failing hard, because their entire competitive advantage came from a custom in-house developed supply chain management tool that beat all of their competitors.

You know its interesting you bring this up. My first internship out of college was with Colgate-Palmolive which from what I recall was one of the largest SAP users in the US at the time (early 2010s). I heard among the grapevine that it was a massive effort to change the whole company around to the "SAP" way of doing things and that competitors (like P&G I think?) attempted but failed to implement SAP and suffered due to it. I don't know if P&G eventually managed to convert to SAP and I often wondered if Colgate could have been run better without SAP?

It was so ingrained into their operations and personally I don't think they could attract the caliber of engineer required to implement an in house system better. The lack of good devs in the industry is a massive problem for companies like Colgate. You just won't get the FAANG caliber devs working for a toothpaste company unless you really go way above and beyond in compensation and even then that might still not be enough to get the numbers you need.

My guess is that SAP(or other ERP) is better than in house for a company that has no competitors that have successfully implemented in house. As soon as you have a competitor that can implement in house better (maybe Amazon compared to their competitors?) then the balance shifts and SAP becomes a liability more than an asset. Not sure, just brainstorming.

I left after a year because coming out of an engineering college with a CS degree doing some complex stuff and then having to writing reports in ABAP depressed me immensely and resulted in one of my worst productive years in my career. I was eventually not offered a full time position because I was so depressed that I just did not complete my projects towards the end of the internship. On a positive note, Colgate was very accommodating and they treated me extremely well when I was there. It worked out though as I am much happier today doing Angular/Python dev.

> 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.

>The worst outcome would be one with parts serialization and keys that are controlled by a foreign country.

This is one way how the US keeps its partners in line. Sure they will sell tons of aircraft and destroyers to countries like Saudi Arabia/Israel/etc. Hell they will even give money to these countries to then have it be spent right back to American companies. But the actual maintenance/parts/upgrades are controlled 100% by the US. They force the country to accept that it is better than nothing and at the same time help the US keep a leash on the country purchasing the equipment.

This concept is being expanded even further. At DEFCON in 2019 there was a talk about retrofitting older war tech with DRM and custom parts to better control who can utilize the equipment should it get out of the hands of the "intended customers". For example, in the Soviet war on Afghanistan, one amazing piece of equipment that helped tip the scales of the war in favor of the US backed Mujahideen fighting the Soviets was the Stinger portable missile system. More recently it has been discovered that systems like these are provided under the table to groups that the US wishes to unofficially support but sometimes tend to go missing and end up being used against the US. As a result, there are now efforts to bolt on digital parts serialization + access control modules to prevent "unauthorized" use/track whereabouts. I find the thought of adding DRM to 1980s technology hilariously silly but then I was treated to Single Sign On/DRM being added to DOOM....yes that DOOM, the one from 1993.

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh7nZ9t2eJA

I think you mean "privy to."

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They didn't make much of that money from Heroku I bet.

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.

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?

> maybe this whole cycle of free tier companies just isn't working?

That feels like a stretch. I can say for myself there are a number of developer services I pay for monthly that I don't think I would have tried if not for the free tier. Once you company starts stagnating (like Heroku) then sure, maybe it's time to kill the free tier since you aren't attracting people (other than scammers) but that's just a sign you are giving up in my eyes.

It might convert users, but that might not matter aid we see these companies continually fall / vanish.