Salesforce.com eats Heroku; Excretes Indigestible Press Release
9 Dec 2010
I realise being a Hater 2.0 is so very 2006, but when I read Salesforce.com’s Heroku acquisition press release this morning it blew my tiny little mind all over my cereal. What on Earth? I love a bit of Leveraging Enterprise Buzzword Linguistic Synergies™, but even on my best day I couldn’t hope to achieve such a perfect cacophony of puff and bullshit.
Now obviously that press release wasn’t written for me. While we’ve been using Cloud 1 since it was Cloud 0.98b, I’ve never used Heroku personally nor professionally. The press release was more likely written to arm the multitude of IT Ops middle management at my former workplace, those long-removed-from-the-trenches starch suits who joyfully wade through mountains of Prince2 Project Management documentation like pigs in mud. But those guys don’t use Heroku. Sure, Salesforce.com want them to use Heroku, but those people aren’t even remotely in the same demographic as the majority of Heroku users singing its praises in Ruby usergroups world wide for the past 3 years.
No, Salesforce, the early adopters largley responsible for Heroku’s excellent public image are mad agile. Not the Agile described in your well layed-out Activity Diagram, agile like a hyperactive mako shark on crystal meth. And you just took something they love(d), and they’re afraid you’ll break it. Obviously Salesforce.com need to drop a traditional Enterprise IT press release such as this one for their audience, but they really should have lead with something to reassure Heroku’s existing users. It screams “We got this shiny thing! Look, it’s SHINY!”. Anywhere there are mentions of this acquisition, there are comments by Heroku users regarding how they’re making plans to leave.
This isn’t like when Facebook change something and an army social media zombies rage for two days then go back to Business As Usual, Heroku’s userbase know why they like Heroku and they know what it will take to build a replacement. And you know what? They probably will.
Navin:
As a suit who has recently re-invented himself as a Rails developer (I couldn’t digest nor produce the cacophony you mention – not without doing major battles with my conscience), I would like to suggest that Salesforce.com do not want suits to use nor understand Heroku.
Instead, they would like them to not be so weirded out when their dev teams talk to them about Heroku (and similar things like Force.com and now Database.com). They will accomplish this by weaving Heroku into their nonsensical-psuedo-English-buzzword-compliant-messaging that keeps the cacophony alive and allows for suits to be comfortable and thought-leader-consultants to charge >$4K per day while providing negative value. So (to your point perhaps) I think that their audience for today (being the day of the acquisition) is, well, the suits, and not the dev community at all.
I feel the mistrust you speak of as well – I hope that we are reassured very soon by Salesforce.com – although I for one would like this to be through their actions (and not just via our brand of hipster speak).
Paul Annesley:
Awesome.