Comment by primitivesuave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by primitivesuave | Hacker News Reader

Firebase is an incredibly powerful tool, and in a sense is a "democratizing force" in web development. Now anyone can build a complete web application without needing to know anything about setting up servers, content delivery networks, AWS (which is still quite difficult to use), and scaling. I teach kids as young as 10 years old to build iOS apps and websites with Firebase - they can develop locally and push to Firebase hosting with a single command. After exploring this new update, I can say with confidence that literally everything is easy-to-use now.

Whenever there is a Firebase announcement there are many replies along the lines of "this won't work for me because it's owned by Google, may be discontinued, doesn't have on-premise solution, etc". If these are your thoughts then you are missing the point of Firebase. It enables small web development shops like mine to focus on building beautiful web applications without having to give up manpower toward backend engineering. The cost of using Firebase is peanuts compared to the savings in employee hours.

Perhaps some day we will have to migrate elsewhere, but I find that possibility extremely unlikely because the clear amount of effort it took to create the Google-y version means this is a long-term play.

We are not missing the point. Some of us just happen to value other things more than convenience.

There's no shortage of discontinued products that were cancelled even though a lot of effort and money was poured into them. Amount previously invested is a sunk cost and shouldn't even matter when deciding if continue a service/product or not. Just because you have already dig a hole doesn't mean you should keep digging even though you can't profit from it.

This is a good point. However, products are usually discontinued because they no longer fit in with the core business of the acquirer. In this case, Google is making a clear statement that Firebase will be an integral part of the Google Cloud experience for everyone (hobbyists all the way to apps at scale).

> sunk cost and shouldn't even matter

Shouldn't but does. It has it's own fallacy section:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs#Loss_aversion_and_t...

Also, not falling for the fallacy means admitting defeat. And the higher up one is in an organization, the worse admitting defeat is for your career. Having a product dead-ended by keeping on working on it forever is much better for manager/government official careers. So sadly, the fact that other people (above you) fall for the fallacy makes falling for it yourself rational in a lot of cases. Instead just systematically lower the priority, but never to zero.

In anything but a startup, I would treat any sunk cost above a minimal level as a firm commitment to continue at any cost. I would never have done so 5 years ago, but ...

Why not put a minimum service life on Firebase similar to an LTS release? I imagine uptake would increase by an order of magnitude.

yea, anyone can build a web application this way... but how well will it scale?

> Perhaps some day we will have to migrate elsewhere, but I find that possibility extremely unlikely because the clear amount of effort it took to create the Google-y version means this is a long-term play.

Hahahahahaha. Aight. Whatever you need to tell yourself. This is even sillier than Parse; FB doesn't have anywhere near the track record of killing projects that Google does.

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