These are wonderful companies -- one trick ponies. They come up with one great product and it almost sells itself. That is, until they cannot come up with new supporting products to increase growth. At this point, the companies install an outside CEO, or they get acquired by a large company while everyone smart cashes out and leaves. The smaller and more agile companies like Cloudflare completely take their market share with a product that will eventually be better. They are like little does that get eaten by the wolves.

Another example is pagerduty. A company that has been around for well over a decade with no product innovation. They installed an outside CEO, a sales/marketing person who really doesn't have the technical know-how to come up with new innovations. As of today, Datadog has entered their market with a direct competitor product. The CEO of Datadog, conversely, lived and breathed dev-ops in his entire work career. He is the wolf that will be eating the lunch of the non-technical does.

Does Datadog really directly compete with PagerDuty? They integrate with one another, and my company uses both, though honestly if Datadog made the kind of alarm-level notifications functionality as PagerDuty I probably wouldn't need PagerDuty anymore. That said, the simplicity of a single-purpose product definitely also has its appeal.

They have started to get directly into pagerduty's space with their incident management features: https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/incident-response-with-datado...

> The smaller and more agile companies like Cloudflare

Cloudflare is smaller than Heroku?

Cloudflare is smaller than Salesforce, which owns Heroku. When a company gets absorbed by a large company, there are usually paralyzing effects.

Agreed. Salesforce has really let it languish. You're even seeing superior offerings with direct competitors like Render.

There is no one who is eg the GM of Heroku. Salesforce has no idea what they have and are basically tying to figure out how to get existing SF customers to use it. I think they want Heroku customers to start using SF more but have no clue how. The result is that Heroku feels abandoned and on life support.

Its too bad because Heroku is a great product that has a ton more potential.

Look, we're building codesphere.com for exactly that :)

Just in time.

Looks great! exactly what I need

Love That!!