when you read Hacker News thread - every single one of them feels like the world is falling apart. Splunk is a dud or so everyone here thinks:
https://siliconangle.com/2023/08/23/splunk-shares-surge-stro...
https://siliconangle.com/2023/08/23/splunk-shares-surge-stro...
HN is mostly a place where technologists gather, not corporate heads of IT or other business people. This is especially true of the subset of users who actively participate rather than only reading.
And it is not unusual in the least for an enterprise product to be wildly profitable but not admired by technologists. Indeed, it's the default; Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, etc.
What is interesting is to look for examples of things that break this mold, that are both profitable and mostly admired. Frankly, I can't think of any... All the ones I can think of were out-competed and either acquired and ruined or just run out of business. Maybe RedHat is the closest example... I'm not sure though.
What's interesting is things that break this mold, like Microsoft Teams, because that's something that can be disrupted, and thus be successful, by having a better product.
Although "enterprise chat" is also entirely owned by unloved corporate products now.
none of these are currently profitable
But I don't think there's really a great place to get a zeitgeist of the rest of the population. I think they're mostly doing other stuff rather than talking about technology on internet forums. (They're smarter than us.)
AWS?
But yeah, this does seem right for the "core" services; ec2, s3, maybe lambda, etc.
It was like that from the beginning. That's why there's much less animosity towards AWS, because they just allow you to run your X without the overhead of infra investment.
The "take a popular OSS system and provide it as a service" thing is a complement to that business model, because they can say "now that you're using our infrastructure, you can also use all these services, and we'll manage it for you, and you'll only have a single vendor to pay". It provides additional value and lock-in to the business model, but isn't the essential part of it.
And no, that isn't where it began. Providing managed services for open source systems was not a part of their initial value proposition. When I started using EC2 (with EBS and S3), one of the tricky things was getting our own database infrastructure to work reliably on EC2.
It's true that RDS was released not long after, and did the "take a popular OSS system" thing, but they really didn't embrace that model until years later. Indeed, I think RDS still seems like second fiddle to their proprietary non-relational DB service.
https://lantern.splunk.com/Splunk_Platform/Splunk_Cloud_Plat...
But it's more useful - though still not the full story at all of course - as a finger on the pulse of the people who actually implement software products, rather than their business models and their sales and marketing.
This is not intended to downplay the importance of any of those things! Those people are just not the majority of the audience here. (I honestly wish I knew where they hang out, but I'm not sure there is such a place - all the people I know in those roles just play their cards much closer to their chests than those of us who participate here.)
As far as the business types, why do you think they'd be here? The community chants grift, scam, and enshittification at pretty much any change in the customer contract these days. Is that the kind of environment that someone on the business side will find welcoming?
But having said that, your comment (and the thread-starter) is a pretty good example of "getting a pulse"! A pulse isn't just "the average viewpoint", it also includes the distribution. And for every bit of conventional HN wisdom like "splunk sucks and is too expensive", there is pretty much always a comment like "splunk is pretty successful, actually". Your "I've been around a long time and attitudes toward SaaSes are actually pretty positive or at least calculating" is part of the "pulse" in this thread.
To wit: I honestly had no idea about splunk. I played with it in the distant past and thought "cool!", but I've never used it in the auspices of an enterprise license, and I've certainly never tried to purchase one myself, so I just didn't know anything about this. And if you had asked me about their recent earnings, I would have similarly had no clue. I just had no idea what the "pulse" on splunk was, either way. And now, because of the zeitgeisty comments making fun of how expensive it is, and also the comments like yours and the thread-starter's pushing back on that narrative, I have an updated prior on the splunk. It surely isn't the full story, and I wouldn't walk into a conversation and be all "I'm an expert on splunk, folks!", but I have a much better sense than I did a few hours ago. That's what I mean by "pulse".
> As far as the business types, why do you think they'd be here?
I didn't say I think they'd be here... I'm the one who pointed out that they aren't! Honestly not sure how you read into my comment what you seem to have read into it. But I'm glad I gave you an opportunity to rant a bit!
The tool itself when I started using it was brilliant and quite deep on capabilities.
All that said, the cost structure for the product can and SHOULD scare away any SMBs. Hosted or cloud, you're probably paying way beyond the value it's bringing in. That's probably the single largest determinant to the product.