It’s time to say goodbye | Hacker News Reader

It’s time to say goodbye

blog.do.com

61 pointschrisacky54 comments

So, I'll take the domain if you don't want it anymore...

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".

I daresay I'm not all that surprised your domain suggestion was registered today.

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.

Looks like it redirects to some real website rather than a for-sale page.

-ish. Possibly the bot in question is for SEO purposes rather than driving page views to ads.

I was hoping for a large background image of someone feeding a donkey, too.

I cannot even begin to express my disappointment.

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.

You're the culprit?

My hope that I'll see a really ugly donkey being fed peanuts as a large background image suddenly grows brighter!

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.

Google image search is a superior solution in this case!

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.

Do is Done.

Thanks, Salesforce! Your purchase of Manymoon and subsequent shutdown of it instills Google-like levels of confidence in your product offerings!

Salesforce is under zero pressure to care what anybody outside of it's extremely profitable walled garden thinks.

Is Salesforce extremely profitable?

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?)

Hah, good point. I forgot about reality! Can we say "lucrative?" There are certainly some houses being bought with SF dollars.

> 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. >

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.

*its extremely profitable

I have no idea why Do is closing down, but I'm guessing it has something to do with lack of ROI. Hence, Salesforce has a fiduciary duty to do so.

This repeated criticism on HN of any company choosing to close down a service is bizarre.

Maybe. But that goodbye post is a joke. No facts, no reason, just a friendly fuck you.

Very true, I received the email twice, insult to injury.

"We are working on a way to export your data, So long suckerss!!!"

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.

[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.

To DO:

You don't need to do anything. Your domain name will pull seven figures+ without you .... doing anything :)

Salesforce (the company behind do.com) is notorious for buying 2-4 letter domains. I'm sure they'll find another way to use it a few years from now.

Data.com comes to mind.

Do.com, Desk.com, Social.com, Work.com, Force.com, Data.com

Quite the list.

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.

Their introduction video has the right context... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pN2OYy0_ok&feature=player_e...

But you can still get hired there :) https://do.com/jobs

What does Do do?

hah

That's the beauty of it... it doesn't do anything!

You can do anything you want at do.com.

The impossible is not a barrier at do.com.

Welcome to do.com.

I thought that was zombo.com.

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.

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.

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

The video they used for launch was great! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7myUgmtFPkc

If you're looking for an alternative check out Paymo 3.0 (shameless plug) - we've just entered public beta: http://www.paymo.biz/blog/paymo-3-0-beta-is-here/

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.

Lucky for you, you won't have to look at it ever again.

It's not do.com, it's doh.com.

You can always switch to getblimp.com. (Shameless plug by a cofounder).

Asana is poised to own the task management space.

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.

Opensource source code??

Was this Any.do or not?

No, Any.do is a different company

do NOT

downvoting?!?!? no one likes Yoda? http://listdose.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Yoda.jpg

Pun and joke threads are discouraged on HN.

Can we give the guy a break on a Friday night? Just letting his post die without upvotes is enough for him to get the idea

I've never been to saleforce.toobig, but they are already irritating? Buying up this, and that, and closing them down.

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