I don't get why anyone in their right mind would invest in a Backend as a service. Ok, maybe things like image uploading, or what not, but not the entire back-end.
I am creating an app as a side project and this makes it a lot more manageable. It is my first time messing with web dev and would rather focus my time developing it instead of having to learn a lot of back-end as well. I understand where you are coming from though. I would like to learn back-end but I already have a lot to learn.
Do you feel that way about all acquisitions? About Parse? About Facebook? We've invested a ton of resources into Parse post-acquisition and continue to do so.
I can't speak for him, but having written stuff using the Facebook API, Facebook is not high on my list of companies to trust in a business context. [1]
The kinds of vendors I like to work with are ones that depend on satisfying people like me. For example, locally owned restaurants in my neighborhood are high on my list, because the owner is present and knows that his livelihood requires serving his customers well.
Personally, I'd never build anything critical with Parse, because Facebook's survival does not depend on satisfying Parse's customers. They could take a $90m write-down tomorrow and nobody would notice. If they did it during a time of adversity, analysts would praise them for "focus".
Another way to look at it is what it would take to kill Parse. My guess is that if any one of a few people left Facebook, the person replacing them could either directly or indirectly kill it off. You see that sort of project-killing happening all the time at companies during reorgs triggered by people leaving. It doesn't have to be a bad business or anything; as long as something doesn't match current strategy or vision or ROI goals or an exec's mood, it's at risk.
Independent companies, though, are much harder to kill: if a CEO took a profitable company and said, "Hey, we're shutting down in 4 months," the investors would find a new CEO. Shutting down a whole company requires the executives and the investors to all agree, so it happens very rarely unless the company is distressed.
[1] That sounds a little unfair. I trust them to be Facebook, by which I mean to act in the best interests of their revenue model as they currently perceive it. I just don't expect that to align closely with my interests, and think any mismatch between the two will be entirely my problem.
Thank you. If you're using Parse as a service, please read this carefully and think about the implications. I loved Parse until they were acquired -- great API and great documentation. Now I would never use them for a project.
Plus, there's the whole Facebook data privacy issue. I've never seen a Parse representative state categorically that Facebook has no plans to data mine Parse customer data (i.e., your customers' data). And I know Facebook too well to trust my customer data to them.
It's not that a service can't stick around post-acquisition, it's that in any company, you can have sweeping changes on the turn of a dime. One large senior management change and entire departments can get shut down or reorganized within a week.
I've seen a $1B public company start winding down a massive revenue-making division within the course of a conference call. Parse is a great service; I certainly hope Facebook doesn't do that and don't imagine they will any time soon, but nothing is impossible.
EDIT: And though you certainly know Facebook's internals better than we do, as an outsider, the risk of an acquired department shutting down is a lot higher if there's a potential to not part of the core business strategy.
