* The industry – suffering because Heroku holds market share that should go to competitors capable of innovating.
* Customers – suffering because their platform will die but their vendor isn't being transparent about that fact.
* Herokai – suffering because they could be doing something better with their careers, even if it is on another sfdc product.
Make sunset plans now and let customers know what the timeline will look like. "Trust is the #1 value" at sfdc, right?
If anyone at Docker is reading this, I mark “100% no” when you interrupt me with pop up asking if I’d recommend your product to a friend when I’m in the middle of working on something entirely unrelated to your product. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t.
As someone who said "I'm sure it can't get any worse" with heroku for many years and was proven wrong over and over, I genuinely don't know what you mean by this. Lots of stuff just doesn't work. Updated buildpacks don't get released on a useful timescale ("just make your own" isn't an answer). The platform is plagued by bizarre performance issues and noisy neighbors, and the pricing doesn't support it. In my time on Heroku, I couldn't break three nines of uptime one year entirely because of platform issues, including one incident where the DNS provider Heroku uses just stopped working in Israel (which Heroku gaslit me about for over a week). I don't know what "operating at scale" means to you, but if the service is consistently bad compared to the competition, it doesn't matter what scale they operate at. It's a meaningless metric.
It does feel like there continues to be a fading at a leadership level about developer experience and what it means. There may not be strategy for what makes Heroku the next Heroku whether engineering or product, but the team that is still there is a solid set of engineers, not 100% there for Salesforce internal stuff, and kudos to them for still keeping afloat what is one of the better ways to deploy an app.