I have no knowledge of what happened at Parse but based on other experiences I've had, a "sudden" shutdown could be a sign of things being done correctly.
Too often, products are in an extended state of limbo. Internally, the company has given up on it but has been dragging its feet on making the decision to shut it down (or just slow about making the decision public).
As a user, I like to know ASAP if a product I use is probably being killed.
From the company's perspective, keeping a product around half-assedly will probably lead to a slow death anyway; just kill it quickly.
While I'm sure this sucks for a lot of people, I'll be honest the shutdown seems pretty fair. One year notice, detailed migration path with accompanying migration tools, and an open source release of the product itself.
I didn't use parse, but this seems like a reasonable way to do it.
I was wondering if you have a public policy in place which outlines what would happen in the event of a Parse-like shutdown or other end-of-company-life event occurring?
I ask in the hopes that it won't be taken as too negative a question but your company is VC-backed in the database space and we've lost a few too many of those this last year.
"Since these things happened on the same day, some have mistakenly assumed that they were related."
Huh? How could you not think two announcements about the same service on the same day by the same company were related?
Facebook totally could have spun this as "We're open sourcing Parse! (oh, and deprecating parse.com)" but a blog post called "Moving On" wouldn't have been the way to do it.
Regardless, releasing an open source version of the service you're shutting down is a hell of a lot more than most companies would do, so kudos to Facebook/Parse for that.
Yep, I hadn't heard of this one. Several of their shutdowns have effectively been product announcements and shutdowns rolled into one for me.
They announce a shutdown, I don't know what it is so I check it out. I get excited for a brief moment until I remember it's getting shutdown.
I'm being a little flippant, but also a little serious. Sometimes you get credible warnings. Sometimes it just comes out of the blue, because it's in management's best interest to keep any impending issues very quiet.
It's good to be looking for these things, but in my experience as soon as your spidey sense goes off, you should have an eye on what's next.
Yes, I can't help to compare this to what happened with Parse. They are shutting down but they released the backend as open source and customers could keep going on.
I think that companies should be more careful at offering "lifetime subscriptions" or similar stuff. You shouldn't be allowed to take back that. Can the people in their boards be sued for damages even if the company closes? I don't know about the USA but in other countries board members are personally responsible in some cases, for example frauds.
That was dead giveaway that they'd shut it down. We instead chose Parse for a project we were just starting, and it's worked out pretty well (except for the bugs they've been having the past week which don't allow us to create new columns or deploy).
Too often, products are in an extended state of limbo. Internally, the company has given up on it but has been dragging its feet on making the decision to shut it down (or just slow about making the decision public).
As a user, I like to know ASAP if a product I use is probably being killed.
From the company's perspective, keeping a product around half-assedly will probably lead to a slow death anyway; just kill it quickly.
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