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.

And that's not all. Parse just did a full rebranding, including a full frontend overhaul of its dashboard.

What the hell is going on?

It's a BA came through and said "Oh, they're not making a billion dollars for us yet? Let's get rid of them!"

BA?

Butthead Astronomer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._litigation#Libel_di...

Business Analyst

Deals often are on and then off or otherwise not necessarily expected to happen. In the midst of that, services typically and properly tend to push forward with what they were already doing as though no deal is going to happen. The worst thing you can do, is halt your progress during a negotiation.

Halting progress indeed seems like the commonsensical thing to do. A massive UI overhaul is not be the most resource-efficient course of action if you plan on announcing your demise. Hence my startling

It actually makes sense that they would cancel the project after a major release (which they were already working on), especially since they open-sourced the stack.

They didn't open source the overhauled web interface.