December 8, 2010 — I came into the office this morning to see a tweet that stopped me in my tracks. Salesforce.com is acquiring Heroku for $212m. In cash! Beyond the obvious bubbliciousness of the deal was a cold hard truth about the once and future kingmakers – developers.
You see I didn’t first hear about Heroku from a marketing exec, or a PR person, or an analyst relations professional, I heard it from Tom Insam, a super-productive developer I was co-working with a little while before Dopplr was acquired by Nokia and airlifted to Berlin. This was very much a Silicon Roundabout story. Tom was all excited about Heroku because he could write code in Ruby on Rails and just deploy it to a server in the sky without needing to consider any implementation or operational details or capacity planning, or anything much. Completely situational. Heroku was basically Rails on a billing engine. Read More
