Comment by chimeracoder
4 hours ago
> It's interesting that internally you had a very different experience with Salesforce buying Heroku and Microsoft buying Github. From the outside it appears to be analagous (except github is degrading quicker than Heroku did?)
This pops up on here frequently. People misremember the Heroku timeline with Salesforce. Most of Heroku's growth and glory days happened after the acquisition. Salesforce actively invested in it and turned it into the powerhouse that people remember today.
At some point, they stopped, and it's not clear why.
People flip the order of the first two and remember it as "Salesforce acquired Heroku and then they went on a downward spiral" but that's not really what happened. There were many years of growth in between, including the period that almost everyone who remembers Heroku fondly remember it for.
I am aware, and I am often the one making that point -- but here we have someone who worked at heroku saying he experienced the SalesForce acquisition as immediately negative and with signals that it was not going to get better and this caused him to leave, so I was discussing within that narrative. I was more intersted in learning about his take from his experience than in trying to tell him he was wrong and salesforce was great for heroku despite his experience working there?
But yes, heroku from the outside kept doing quite well for the first years of Salesforce ownership, whether becuase they let them alone and kept their budget going, or whatever. That's why I suggested that from the outside github's slide was much faster.
idan (who again, tells us they worked at heroku) replied to me in this thread:
> Salesforce never understood Heroku. Salesforce's understanding of Heroku, if such an understanding ever existed, was wildly different than what Heroku understood it wanted to be. Benioff's penchant for buying himself a company every year did not help — "no headcount this year, we're buying Mulesoft/Quip/Tableau/Slack/$WHATEVER. And oops we spent too much money on dreamforce. Sucks that your pager rotations are burning people out!" It was very clear they did not give a shit about us, as evidenced by resources.
> It's safe to say that I'm hypersensitive to these antipatterns and have been looking out for them at GitHub, and I don't see them.
At the point we're quoting other people's replies in other parts of the thread becuase we're not all even having the same conversation anymore, we're probably done!