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Why the big difference? For one thing, Salesforce.com's operating expenses rose 40% year over year to $656.3 million, with big increases in head count as well as research and development, sales and marketing, and general administrative expenses.
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They want to be the market leader so they keep expanding as long as they have money.
They can always reduce the headcounts and becomes profitable.
Soberly exercised fiduciary duty is probably around #15 on the reason why things get closed down. Other things that I expect are higher include a couple of key people leaving; a manager not liking another manager; an executive not really understanding the product, the audience, the market, or the potential; idiocy; somebody wanting their budget; somebody being envious of their success; somebody hating the guy who ok'd the acquisition; the departure of the guy who ok'd the acquisition; more idiocy; somebody suddenly needing to be seen as a bold and decisive leader; the need for a distraction; or it not being mauve [1].
There is no particular reason to think high-level executives at a company have a better understanding of one of their minor products than do the people who post here on Hacker News. Indeed, the people posting here demonstrably have a surplus of time, nosiness, and interest in the industry. High-level executives are generally insanely busy and very focused on their jobs. Which includes understanding their industry, but only as a relatively small fraction of their time.
Thats an odd bit of news. I'm in the CRM market (http://www.radiumcrm.com) and as a competitor I always admired the product. It was a very clean UI, had some nice features and was a good complement to the behemoth that is Salesforce. I can't imagine why they would shut it down.
I can only agree. Do had a really clean, intuitive design. I didn't used it on a daily basis, but - just like latraveler - I was checking out the competition for my company's product a couple of years ago. Out of all the todo list apps I signed up for (and hell, there sure is a lot to choose from), Do was actually the easiest one to use, basically everything was where I expected it to be. It had the perfect balance between the Basecamp feature-rich but complex UI and the glamorous but over-simplified Wunderlist.
Also they must have payed a fortune for their domain, Salesforce probably intends to reuse it soon.
I was just wondering how much less time a website owner will be willing to stick it out on a sinking business for each additional dollar of domain name value. It's got to be a lot more tempting to bail on a site when it means you can sell "do.com" than if the site is "PeanutsForUglyDonkeys.com".
Ha! I was secretly hoping that I'd cost the owner of some bot a wasted registration fee. Now let's all go visit so that they project a profit before the refund grace period ends.
No it was manually registered. I'd had a few beers while lurking on HN and the name seemed hilarious. I've sobered up now. It's still hilarious. Thanks.
This is one of those moments where I'm almost tempted to spend the 10K hours I need to learn to draw. Almost. But then I invariably head to Google image search.
I'm a Salesforce admin and I never understood why Salesforce didn't do more to integrate Do into their platform. The only thing they did was a half-assed AppExchange app which was nearly useless and had no direct integration with the core functionality (why have a collaboration platform if you can't feed it into your organization's data?).
Then again, they probably just bought it mainly for the domain name.
i dont think so. i have used asana for my team and couldnt make it stick. we used trello which was better but isn't perfect either. it just seems to me that I shouldn't have to learn another software just to organize my to-do list.
i dont think so. i have used asana for my team and couldnt make it stick. we used trello which was better but isn't perfect either. it just seems to me that I shouldn't have to learn another software just to organize my to-do list.
We've had to use asana for a particular customer project recently and it's really not that great. For me trello is a far better implementation of task management.
Sorry, a bit off topic, but am I the only one that finds that webpage really horrible to look at? The background makes me think I have a dirty screen. I find it quite unpleasant to look at.
If you have a good idea about what to do with the do.com name, maybe they will give it to you if you partecipate to their $1M first price hackathon ;-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6614973
Shutdown stories are a braggart form of "fuck you." Early adopters just have to be careful not to rely on ventures by founders that have a history of creating a little value only to throw it all away later.
For the Nth time, for unsold ventures, don't just shutdown if you get bored of something, find a buyer! Not only might this make you some money, it may also salvage your rep for not being someone that abandons their base mercurially.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 84.8 ms ] threadYou don't need to do anything. Your domain name will pull seven figures+ without you .... doing anything :)
Quite the list.
Thanks, Salesforce! Your purchase of Manymoon and subsequent shutdown of it instills Google-like levels of confidence in your product offerings!
http://beta.fool.com/boriskabinov/2012/08/13/will-salesforce...
http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applicati...
Looks like the answer is... not yet. (maybe never?)
They want to be the market leader so they keep expanding as long as they have money.
They can always reduce the headcounts and becomes profitable.
This repeated criticism on HN of any company choosing to close down a service is bizarre.
"We are working on a way to export your data, So long suckerss!!!"
There is no particular reason to think high-level executives at a company have a better understanding of one of their minor products than do the people who post here on Hacker News. Indeed, the people posting here demonstrably have a surplus of time, nosiness, and interest in the industry. High-level executives are generally insanely busy and very focused on their jobs. Which includes understanding their industry, but only as a relatively small fraction of their time.
[1] http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-17/
Updated to add: I have no idea what goes on inside Salesforce; this view comes mainly from 25 years of reading the business press.
Also they must have payed a fortune for their domain, Salesforce probably intends to reuse it soon.
The impossible is not a barrier at do.com.
Welcome to do.com.
I cannot even begin to express my disappointment.
My hope that I'll see a really ugly donkey being fed peanuts as a large background image suddenly grows brighter!
I could've sworn I had saved or bookmarked the perfect donkey picture, too. It's a pity I can't seem to find it right now.
For the Nth time, for unsold ventures, don't just shutdown if you get bored of something, find a buyer! Not only might this make you some money, it may also salvage your rep for not being someone that abandons their base mercurially.