Do Is Done

Taco Cowboy writes "Salesforce has announced that it will be shutting down its task management software Do.com on 31 January 2014. 'Salesforce acquired the social productivity company back in February 2011, when it was called Manymoon. At the time, Manymoon served over 50,000 companies.' The announcement was made in an email to customers yesterday. The company did say they are working on an export tool to retrieve data from Do.com. It will be ready on 15 November. Users will no longer be charged after 1 November, and yearly subscribers will get a pro-rated refund."

Comments

Huh?

[Frosty Piss]

Do.com? Manymoon.com? Sorry... No clue.

Re:Huh?

[wonkey_monkey]

Didn't you know? It's the law that if you don't already know enough to know what a story is about, then you're not allowed to ask questions and must remain silent lest you anger the gods by showing any curiousity within these hallowed pages.

Re: Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the next few weeks they'll be purchasing and setting up a redirect to "doh.com"..

Re:Huh?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Do.com? Manymoon.com? Sorry... No clue.

Yeah, the two way to get customers is to do marketing or to have your users spread word of how great your product is. I never saw either on these guys. Great products have the latter, good products have both, and danger-danger products have only the former. With neither, I guess it's somebody's pet project.

Re:Huh?

[blackraven14250]

How, exactly, does having marketing preclude it being a great product?

The product that sells in large quantities is the one with effective marketing, and the product that performs well is the one with users' support. They are not mutually exclusive.

Re:Huh?

[deltaromeo]

Same here! I thought this was going to be about Gnome-Do which I stopped using a long time ago in favour of Synapse.

Odd timing

[pla]

Curious, that they would choose to do this just a few weeks before their annual Dreamforce trade-show. You'd think they'd wait just one more month to pull the plug...

Unless they plan to announce some shiny alternative at Dreamforce. A far more expensive alternative, of course. But Shiny.

Hmm...

Re:Odd timing

[Charliemopps]

I've noticed that most SASS companies have been pulling in the reigns lately and trying to focus more on core functionality. I think a lot of these companies had been adding every service they could think of, then their customers would get the tool and run with it. A year or two later they find that its not all that profitable but their customers now have business processes dependent on it and are pissed when they find out it's not being developed any longer. More and more when we deal with a SASS vendor we're demanding to see their "Roadmap" so we don't use the bits that are getting deprecated.

Re:Odd timing

[gl4ss]

why? they obviously want the companies into salesforce, so now they have an oppurtunity to push that angle.

Re:Odd timing

[gl4ss]

a funny thing about sw roadmaps....

I followed one big consumer communication electronics manufacturers roadmaps for many years - both those published for world wide pr and sometimes with glimpses into the internal.

they never, ever followed through on them. NEVER, not once was their 12 month roadmap worth the bits it occupied. and that's for the features - but what became really funny over the longer time period is that they never managed to even stick to the naming schemes( major version always used a different naming/versioning scheme than the last despite all of them having a number on them - the number on them eventually went up and down and skipped numbers too, though skipped numbers were I think in two instances because of the mentioned roadmap having a release on them that used the number, even if those releases then never materialized).

Re:Odd timing

[GNious]

We went from version 1.5 to v6.1 to 20xx.y in a decade... I think the next release will be version 9.

Re:Odd timing

[Cederic]

The question you need answering about software roadmaps is less about the feature set they're adding - that'll depend on demands from the biggest customers and an element of strategy - but the areas of focus for the company.

Salesforce will be developing the primary force.com platform, so a reasonable question is 'how are you integrating do.com, are you looking to expand it or migrate the customers, what are your plans for ..'

You're right that specific feature sets can and will change, but the future of the entire platform should be possible to determine..

50,000 companies?

[roman_mir]

Seriously, these ridiculous numbers, like: 50,000 companies were clients of whatevermoomoo.com should not be trusted. No company that can serve 50,000 companies loses business, if necessary it can transform business, it can lower prices, it can do whatever it takes to hold on to that gigantic customer base. More than that, if you have 50,000 companies on your resume, you think it's hard to land business in another 1000? Seriously, SAP or Oracle or Microsoft or IBM or Google or Apple or whatever has that kind of customer base, do you see them just shutting down at some point, disappearing because they can no longer figure out HOW to serve 50,000+ companies as customers?

These are made up numbers.

Re:50,000 companies?

[Frosty Piss]

Seriously, these ridiculous numbers, like: 50,000 companies were clients of whatevermoomoo.com should not be trusted. No company that can serve 50,000 companies loses business...

Perhaps what they meant to say was that they had 50,000 web site hits...

Re:50,000 companies?

[rsborg]

Seriously, these ridiculous numbers, like: 50,000 companies were clients of whatevermoomoo.com should not be trusted.

My Google Apps was one of those "businesses" that tried out Manymoon's Google Apps plugin. I'm not going to buy anything, and stopped using it shortly. If that's the quality of the businesses that are part of the 50,000 then I wouldn't be surprised it's being shuttered. That said its bizarre that Salesforce couldn't just rebrand it and merge it into it's CRM offering.

Re:50,000 companies?

[CastrTroy]

SAP, IBM, and Microsoft most likely charge their customers a lot more than these guys did. Just because they "serve" 50,000 companies, doesn't mean those companies were paying them anything. Also, the customers of SAP, IBM, and Microsoft are probably most likely larger companies. Perhaps all the companies they were serving were really small mom and pop businesses, and they weren't paying anything, or were only paying $5 a month.

Re:50,000 companies?

[Bite The Pillow]

One of the companies was apparently Google. I guess we won't trust those idiots again.

Manymoon started out as free, which is probably where the 50k number came from. After being acquired, the plan was to keep giving it away while selling it to people who wanted to buy whatever premium services it added. How ridiculous is 50k companies/users on a free application which stayed near the top of Google Apps and LinkedIn apps lists?

The release announcement, when Manymoon became Do.com is worth a read for anyone who wants to register an informed opinion.

From all accounts, it was a decent way to get stuff done while on the go, even if "on the go" means being physically in the same place as other people, just not talking to them at the moment.

Do?

[Keruo]

I never used Do, but for social project management/tasks I'd give asana a try.
I've been using their free version for few personal projects and it's great.

Pity

[wirefarm]

It was a very simple, very clear service that I could actually use with non-technical clients for project management.

Good thing is, you could probably duplicate the functionality in Ruby on Rails in a weekend

Re:Pity

[Skapare]

I'm a Python programmer, not a Ruby programmer, you insensitive clod. And what about my Java programmer friends?

Go is Gone

[Anonymous Coward]

"Megadream has announced that it will be shutting gown its sleep management software Go.com on 31 January 2014. 'Megadream acquired the super productivity company back in February 2011, when it was called Honeymoon. At the time, Honeymoon served over 50,000 couples.' The announcement was made in an email to squirrels yesterday. The company did say they are working on an export stool to retrieve hats from Go.com. It will be ready on 15 November. Users will no longer be charged after 1 November, and yearly subscribers will get a pro-rated refund."

Why You Shouldn't Trust the Cloud

[rueger]

Another web based service has the plug pulled with little or no warning. When Google does it it's news. When a small company does it it gets ignored.

In my case it was little company called Catch.com, which synced notes written in a little app called AK Notepad. Not the end of the world, but intensely irritating when it just stopped working one day and all data disappeared. And when they were too scummy to leave some way of downloading user data after a month or so.

At this point I'm looking at moving pretty much everything out of web based services and back to my desktop, or at least to a server space that I control. And watching ideas like Ark.OS with considerable interest.

I may not be a multinational corporation, but I no longer trust any company to handle data that matters to me.

Re:Why You Shouldn't Trust the Cloud

[rueger]

Agreed that Ark.OS isn't yet THE answer, but it is looking in the right directions.

As much as I like the ubiquity of Google's services - everything available anywhere, at any time - I find myself looking back very fondly to my old Palm Pilots. One sync per day to my desktop machine, and I knew that my contacts etc were safe and secure.

What I really want is a way to sync my smartphone's contents with the server that hosts our web sites, without forcing everything through someone else's servers.

Re:Why You Shouldn't Trust the Cloud

[Bite The Pillow]

I don't follow - SalesForce had $957M in revenue last quarter, and this is definitely news - it's not some small company that never made it to the front page of Slashdot.

Large companies hosting cloud services with paid accounts will always provide some sort of transition warning, because expensive lawsuits follow when they don't. You don't need to file a suit, just wait for someone else to - it's inevitable.

If you trust a small company to handle your data, you're asking for problems. If you're asking it to do so for free, which is how Manymoon started and Do.com continued, you're basically asking to be screwed over the barrel.

It looks like Catch.com was free, based on this quote "Users there are already lamenting the loss, begging Catch.com to reconsider, or release a paid version." So what really did you expect? Evernote was beating the hell out of Catch based on all free market measures, so the outcome there is pretty much guaranteed.

Re:Why You Shouldn't Trust the Cloud

[blackraven14250]

Except, these guys are absolutely not doing the same thing Catch did to you. First, they're announcing it months in advance. Second, they're making it cost nothing for users for the months leading up to the shutdown. Finally, they're providing an export tool well in advance.

Massofass, BeaucoupPatout, Tons-O-Buns...

[Hognoxious]

Manymoon? Was Bunchabutts already taken?

Oracle & MySQL?

[upside]

Could it be they plan to offer a more expensive service?

Re:not really for nerds and not stuff that matters

[Cederic]

Ok, maybe I'm a manager.

Cloud services shutting down is interesting. What happens to their data is interesting. The whole SaaS market has been changing throughout the lifetime of the Internet, and it's interesting.

How fucking techy do you want? Aren't you interested in the very different approaches to cloud software, from IaaS (Infrastructure), PaaS, IaaS (integration), SaaS, etc. The different models offered by Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce. The complexities and legalities of hosting your data externally, and the architectural complications arising from use of multiple cloud solutions combined with in-house systems? The trade-offs between remote execution and local control?

This may not be your particular brand of 'techy' but trust me, there's a fuck of a lot going on here. And one of the major cloud services providers shutting down a service is very interesting, both for the 'why' and the 'how'.

Re:not really for nerds and not stuff that matters

[garyebickford]

Yes. It's not on the bits & bytes level, but the complexities are fundamentally similar and the answers can be just as, or more, difficult to figure out. And the additional impact can be enormous. I haven't had to actually roll out any cloud based services, but I'm looking at a couple right now for a presently-small-but-hopefully-larger business. Managing the loss of a SaaS vendor (for any reason) is analogous to a NAS or other major data center component blowing up (or preferably getting ready to die, so we can do something in advance) - questions like "where is the data backed up" and "how do we migrate our data to the new server/service" must be answered.

In both cases, in the ideal case all of the possibilities have been explored and contingency plans have been created (and maintained). For instance, it seems to naive me, for example, using cloud products that support the OpenStack standard, and having at least one running test/failover system either in-house or at another vendor's facility, along with other strategies, would minimize the potential impact and provide maximum flexibility. But it's never quite that simple.

Re:I thought it was the "do" keyword

[garyebickford]

It's just vocabulary. In FORTRAN, "DO 100 I = 1,10" where 100 is the line number of the last statement in the loop means the same thing as "for (i=1;i=10;i++) {...} In the card, punch tape, and early 110 baud (10 chars/sec) teleprinter days shorter was very advantageous - the same reason that most of the common unix commands are two letters.