IT Consolidation

I’ve been working on the new edition of my best selling book Full Stack JavaScript. I was updating references, links and names of the services. A lot of libraries are dead and the links are unreachable. A lot of services are dead or being bought by big companies. The list is huge. Compose which was MongoHQ is now part of IBM. StrongLoop is part of IBM. Heroku is part of Salesforce. Parse.com was bought and discontinued. Firebase is part of Google. Joyent is part of Samsung.

It’s kind of depressing. Take a look at this page. Nodejitsu, which was one of the first Node PaaS solutions, says it joins GoDaddy which is just an hiring of the team. They refer to Modulus which you think is another PaaS, but it’s not. It’s a very poorly-done website for what looks like some consulting company in the trading space or like some scam a 14-year old kid put together to get money for video games. The link to the blog post announcing Nodejitsu closure is 404 Not Found.

The previous edition of Full Stack JavaScript was published in 2015. In three years, a lot of companies either sold for scraps or closed or both (sold then closed the projects). It’s very refreshing to see this trend in a long span of several years.

Every market goes through cycles. First there’s an expansion with various offerings and then there’s a retraction with just a few major players dominating. It’s a winner takes all economy. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM are serving major cloud services now. Startups are hard and most of them don’t know how execute. VCs are pushing for startups to spend more to acquire marketshare. The big companies have more leverage and more room for mistakes. They can just buy the best startup in the end.

Is it still worth trying to start your tech startup in 2018? Probably not unless it’s something completely new. You can’t drive forward while looking in a rear view mirror.