It was mobile first, so I could see how you could argue that a pandemic was bad for a platform built around mobile. Having said that, the management seems to have been crap too and it seems crazy that they weren't able to acqui-quit.
As someone who joined pre-pandemic, my opinion is that we were unsustainably lean at the time. I was shocked at how small the infrastructure team was when I joined the company and things were honestly a bit rickety at the user scale we were at then. While engineering was probably the single biggest department, a large chunk of that 200 were in departments like Trust & Safety and Customer Experience (support).
We saw a huge amount of user growth during the pandemic, we massively increased the number of users that could be in a single guild (server), we launched features that asked a lot more from our AV backend (stage channels, camera video in guild voice), had to deal with a massive increase in spam during the crypto boom, expanded voice calls to Xbox and PS5 and had to deal with an increasingly fraught regulatory environment.
We also shipped a lot of user-facing features during that timeframe. Some of those ultimately got removed because of poor results and depending on your use of the platform I imagine some of those that stayed may not be particularly visible, but we really did ship a lot of stuff and I'm not going to attempt to list it all here.
Obviously, in hindsight we should have had a tighter focus and probably hired a bit less, but this sentiment that we are/were hugely bloated feels pretty wild to me from where I'm sitting.
They did. They bought a great mobile backend called Parse and shut it down.
Some of us who had to deal with it still have bad memories.
> Parse was a mobile backend as a service platform originally developed by the provider Parse, Inc. The company was acquired by Facebook in 2013 and shut down in January 2017.[1][2] Following the announcement in 2016 of the impending shutdown, the platform was subsequently open sourced.
I stabilized them over the course of that year and helped them transition to new developers. Company is doing fine as far as I know and should be for a while.
They've got a massive network effect which is why they were able to survive months of chaos from a bad rebuild. That's the only reason I came on in the first place. The network effect bought a lot of time to fix things and there was no clear "Facebook" to their "MySpace."
Really the only thing working against the company is that their target market is aging a lot.
Great point since it was a well functioning large messaging platform. That's not easy, a ton of work went into marketing, engineering, and strategy to get to this point. All that thrown away, yikes.
Sounds like they made the right choice because the platform collapsed. It makes no sense spending design and dev time on a platform that simply isn't taking off.
The mass adoption of Zoom in areas where it really shouldn't have been used and the lack of support to users has been shocking to me. It really felt like this just happened to be the company that took off because of the pandemic but a scrappy startup could have done this 1000x better.
Yup, and they bungled that one pretty well when they shut down the entire ecosystem. They never recovered after that. They lost all the developer goodwill and any chances of becoming a platform was vaporized at that exact instant.
Sounds like they should have shut down the product but kept the developers. If they were able to run the business on their own, they were probably 10x developers. Even if they lost half of their momentum by being switched to a new team, they still would have been great for the company.
sounds like a pretty lame excuse. It failed because the market is saturated, the growth slowed, and the margins are low . It was badly managed company, a poor product, and a bad marketplace. There are many major successful web 2.0 companies are over-funded but didn't fail.
TLDR- the founder quit, a bunch of suits took over, they gutted the dev team and put the app on life support for years. Bugs piled up and nobody could fix them so they outsourced to a new offshore team who rewrote the whole thing in Electron... which of course was waaay too little, way too late.
The didn't do a very good job during their tenure. As a user all I could tell that they did was re-architect and redesign the site several times without actually pushing the platform forward at all.
The cynic in me reads that as the founders realized they had put a decade into something which is going to be steamrolled by corporate machines and if they didn't get out fast they wouldn't have anything to show for it. That is a sad way to go if it was the motivation.
That said, there seems to have been a wealth of ideas about how to improve the product and better serve the customers which went unimplemented. If my understanding of that is correct then the fault lays solidly on the management team for not being able to communicate and lead the troops.
They failed in communication and lost trust. If their platform could not scale to the needs of their users, they should come out and say it, and should have done so before the fallout.
I posit that they made the right business decision. At any one of the points where they could have embraced new technology, they were at high risk of getting into a no-win dev cycle and destroying their business.
I don't know about the technical side. They failed to deliver a platform for app developers, failed to deliver a touch screen GUI (remember the Storm?) and especially failed to deliver a touch screen keyboard.
They either were not that great at executing and more sales focused or magically got poached quite heavily.
Why can't both things be true? It could very well be the case that they would have been happy to carry on with the market if it still all worked, but they didn't feel like they could justify the trouble of migrating it to a new platform.
I don't know. I think if they had souped up RSS they would have been in a much better position and maybe it would have been more sustainable but a long series of missteps has led them to this point. I think the biggest mistake they made was shutting down the developer ecosystem. They never recovered after that.
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