Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by statictype 1732 days ago
MongoDB and Twilio have both done reasonably well haven't they?

Which developer tools have not done well?

3 comments

twilio is not a developer tool. twilio is a communications company that has great developer outreach
"... twilio is not a developer tool ..."

Thank you. Strongly agree.

Every day I run into something Twilio could be doing to make development and tooling and workflows better for people who are actually using twilio for telephony.

Instead, they are spending their time, energy and acquisition dollars building "customer engagement at scale" which is a fancy term for spam.

Twilio’s product is an API.

The end-user of (most of) their products are developers.

the product is the communications. the people on the phone. reading sms. getting emails. the end user of twilio’s products probably have never heard of twilio and don’t even know their using it
And their product is for developers.

Are you trying to claim that AWS is not for developers because the end users who visit website hosted on AWS are not developers?

Perhaps a better way to phrase it: Twilio’s customers are developers.

Their products are built to be used by developers.

As an analogy, AWS’s customer is Netflix. Not the end user who is watching a movie that streams out of an EC2 instance.

with the clever “ask your developer” billboard campaign
Atlassian too
Docker is the main one I can think of that has flopped financially despite being widely use.
... and it hasn't actually flopped. It just reached its level of... usefulness. As others commented a few weeks ago in a different conversation, Swarm had/has significant utility for smaller deployments, but K8S has sucked the air out of the (marketing) room. So life goes on, as does docker and Docker Hub. Many of us small potatoes users will continue to use docker until we can't, and then probably wind up on podman, or lxd. That will be OK too: as long as the work gets done. We survived the demise of Solaris Freeware, we'll survive this too.