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Comment by ChikkaChiChi | Hacker News Reader

Do is Done.

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

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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.

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