Ingrid Lunden:
Facebook once had big ambitions to be a major player in enterprise communication and productivity, but today the social network’s parent company Meta will be closing a very significant chapter in that story. TechCrunch has learned that Meta is shuttering Workplace, a version of Facebook that had been built to enable communication among business teams and wider organizations.
[…]
According to a memo to Workplace customers, the company is is recommending Zoom-owned Workvivo as a migration-ready alternative.
Quentyn Kennemer:
TechCrunch reports that development slowed considerably after people returned to offices that had been empty due to the covid pandemic and after a number of key employees left. The shift popped the bubble for an increasingly crowded space for remote work tools. Stronger competition from Microsoft Teams, Google Workplace, and even new entrants like Zoom Workplace caused Meta to slow down after a decade of development.
Tanay Jaipuria:
Meta is discontinuing their enterprise offering Workplace, which per my estimates was a >$150M ARR business.
Just a reminder the scale big tech is at for business lines to be meaningful to them
John Carmack:
Well this sucks. I liked Workplace, both at Meta and currently at Keen.
I assume Meta will continue maintaining their internal version, rather than adopting the suggested commercial option, which may have similar downsides to their continued use of Mercurial vs Git.
Previously:
Update (2024-05-17): David Heinemeier Hansson:
The traditional wisdom goes that if you buy from a big company, you’re going to be safe. It may be more expensive, but big companies project an image of stability and reliability, so buying their wares is seen as the prudent choice. Except, it isn’t.
Update (2024-06-04): Dan Grover:
The genius of FB Workplace (and its sole redeeming attribute that makes up for other flaws) is the emphasis on lightweight signals of engagement (reactions and “read” indicators, etc). In the absence of that, in an async env with other tools, you are forever scheduling meetings to say “Okay, did you actually see this? Were there parts you disagreed with?” on very minor things.
This is normal to do (even at FB) on like big project proposals, designs, etc. But I find myself constantly in doubt on like individual Slack messages these days.
Business Chat Facebook Meta Slack Sunset Web
Mysk:
iPhone users in the EU: DO NOT delete your alternative marketplace apps
iOS 17.5 breaks alternative marketplace app re-installation. MarketplaceKit now generates a different client_id every time it is called. Now there’s no way for alternative marketplace developers to identify users who have already purchased the marketplace app.
Apple addressed a security issue we reported about the way MarketplaceKit handles client_id. The issue is fixed. But now developers are left with no option to identify installs and roughly estimate the Core Technology Fee (CTF) they owe Apple.
Tim Sweeney:
A couple months in, Apple has already broken a basic feature required by competing app stores. 😕
It’s probably only needed because of the Core Technology Fee, which Apple decided to impose.
Scott Miller:
It really seems like Apple is never gonna play nice and will always do whatever they can to sully the user experience with third-party stores. Competing stores will forever have to keep dealing with Apple making third-party stores a less-than-Apple-store experience.
Mysk:
Just installed
@Setapp, a very promising alternative marketplace in the EU. BUT it’s unclear if such stores are going to survive a surge of undetected installs due to the lack of device identifiers.
Marketplaces might end up owing Apple loads of unexpected Core Technology Fee.
Previously:
AltStore App Marketplaces Business European Union iOS iOS 17 Setapp
Richard Speed (via Hacker News):
Google’s Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has weighed in on the UniSuper fiasco and confirmed that UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription was accidentally deleted.
In a joint statement with UniSuper CEO Peter Chun, Kurian admitted that an “inadvertent misconfiguration” during the provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services resulted in the deletion of the subscription.
In a cascade of catastrophe familiar to anyone using duplication, the deletion of the account resulted in deletion across other regions.
Two weeks later, they are finally fully restored:
Restoring UniSuper’s Private Cloud instance has called for an incredible amount of focus, effort, and partnership between our teams to enable an extensive recovery of all the core systems. The dedication and collaboration between UniSuper and Google Cloud has led to an extensive recovery of our Private Cloud which includes hundreds of virtual machines, databases and applications.
UniSuper had backups in place with an additional service provider. These backups have minimised data loss, and significantly improved the ability of UniSuper and Google Cloud to complete the restoration.
auspiv:
The customer isn’t exactly small either - “UniSuper is an Australian superannuation fund that provides superannuation services to employees of Australia’s higher education and research sector. The fund has over 620,000 members and $120 billion in assets (funds under management and total member accounts at 7 July 2021).”
Previously:
Update (2024-05-30): Ron Amadeo (via Slashdot):
In the immediate aftermath, the explanation we got was that “the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription.” Two weeks later, Google Cloud’s internal review of the problem is finished, and the company has a blog post up detailing what happened.
Google has a “TL;DR” at the top of the post, and it sounds like a Google employee got an input wrong.
[…]
The most shocking thing about Google’s blunder was the sudden and irreversible deletion of a customer account. Shouldn’t there be protections, notifications, and confirmations in place to never accidentally delete something? Google says there are, but those warnings are for a “customer-initiated deletion” and didn’t work when using the admin tool.
[…]
In its post-mortem, Google now says, “Data backups that were stored in Google Cloud Storage in the same region were not impacted by the deletion, and, along with third-party backup software, were instrumental in aiding the rapid restoration.” It’s hard to square these two statements, especially with the two-week recovery period. The goal of a backup is to be quickly restored; so either UniSuper’s backups didn’t get deleted and weren’t effective, leading to two weeks of downtime, or they would have been effective had they not been partially or completely wiped out.
Backup Cloud Datacide Google Google Cloud Platform
Michael Potuck:
Following the acquisition, Broadcom’s VMware has announced today that Fusion Pro 13 and Workstation Pro 17 have been made free for personal use.
[…]
For commercial use, Broadcom has simplified the VMware options to a single product, which can be purchased through any “Broadcom Advantage” partner.
Michael Roy:
This means that everyday users who want a virtual lab on their Mac, Windows or Linux computer can do so for free simply by registering and downloading the latest build from the new download portal located at support.broadcom.com.
[…]
This simplification eliminates 40+ other SKUs and makes quoting and purchasing VMware Desktop Hypervisor apps, Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro, easier than ever.
Previously:
Bargain Business Mac Mac App macOS 14 Sonoma VMware
