Heroku: The Next Level (Salesforce.com acquisition)

I think it has something to do with the fact that Microsoft had just invested close to $10M in Heroku in the weeks prior to the acquisition (making Microsoft the biggest investee in Heroku). Right now, Salesforce is positioning themselves against the Microsofts and the Oracles (versus the smaller CRMs like ZoHo, Sugar, etc.); the Heroku purchase was probably more strategic than anything else...

Why does it leave you wondering that? Because the barometer of success is an early exit?

Engine Yard and Heroku are two different companies with very different products, both offer fully managed hosting, but the similarities end there. Heroku is optimized for ease-of-use, automation, and keeping support costs low by enforcing a completely blackbox architecture. Engine Yard is optimized for flexibility. In addition to AppCloud on EC2, they have XCloud which provides PCI compliance, networked data shares, and other things certain applications might need. If Heroku meets your needs it might be better, but Engine Yard covers a much wider set of needs. I expect both companies are quite profitable. I'm not seeing any strategic errors on either side.

To be fair, Salesforce.com was basically the first hugely successful SaaS company. Calling it the "original cloud company" is a bit stilted, but still, they do have some claim to being "original".

As far as enterprise applications are concerned Salesforce pretty much were the first supplier to convince CIOs that you could deliver a critical application like CRM as a service rather than an in-house hosted app.

I really don't like the "I stopped reading after that line" meme. It's basically a way of saying "I am militantly ignorant about the article under discussion because of my knee-jerk reaction to one sentence early in the article".

Can someone please explain the disdain for Salesforce around here?