So I’ve been keeping an eye on the recent acquisition of Heroku by
Salesforce.com, and truth be told, I’m pretty concerned. I’ve been
developing an app recently that I had planned to launch on Heroku,
before I heard about this merger. But now that Salesforce.com is
about to finish the acquisition of Heroku, I’m not so sure that’s a
good idea.
But the question I have is: what do you think?
I fully concede that I could be over-paranoid here. It’s happened
before and I’m sure it’ll happen again. But in a world where we see
large IT companies gobbling up everything in sight (Oracle, Google,
Apple, Microsoft) as a strategy to limit competition and force vendor
lock-in, as well as with what Oracle’s done with MySQL (and what it’s
obvious they plan to do - make it crippled and pointless over time,
forcing people to buy Oracle and effectively killing an open source
database competitor), it would be foolish for me not to at least
consider what Salesforce.com’s future strategy is for Heroku.
Not only that, but in my opinion, these days, CEO’s are every bit as
“dodgy” and untrustworthy as politicians. I don’t believe a word
they’re saying. Just because CEO X says something today doesn’t mean
that’s what’ll actually happen three months down the line.
So I’m curious - what do you guys think? Am I over-paranoid here,
thinking that SF is basically going to try to “pull an Oracle” on
Heroku (jacking up the price, killing the service’s usefulness, etc.),
or do you think that SF is a “good steward” of something like Heroku?
My biggest concern is launching my app on Heroku, only to find that SF
jacks up the prices, or starts charging differently for various
components that would make the application take a nose-dive in terms
of profitability or cost-effective scalability. Not only that, but
I’m concerned that if the do these things, I may have some difficulty
later getting access to my data so I can move the application
somewhere else (i.e. vendor lock-in).
Am I being paranoid, or are these concerns well founded?
