Facebook's business is booming. Last quarter, the social media giant's profits rose 57 percent. That, of course, launched the company's stocks to even greater heights, with the value of its shares rising 15 percent.
For Mark Zuckerberg, his worth was calculated at about $5.5 billion, moving him up to the number six spot on the list of the wealthiest people in the world. Not to mention the Facebook boss was also on paternity leave caring for baby daughter Max about one-third of the time. Now that's a pretty sweet deal.
A large majority of all that profit and revenue is coming from Facebook's ad business – about 80 percent coming from mobile ads, to be exact. So while the grass definitely is greener in getting more eyeballs to see ads, not all parts of the company continue to flourish.
Faced with stiff competition in the cloud business from Amazon, Google and Microsoft, whose software is much more mature, Facebook has decided to bow out and and shut down its Parse developer platform.
On the Parse blog, developers are informed that the platform will shut down exactly one year from now. That should allow developers enough time to transition elsewhere using a database migration tool. In addition, Parse is also releasing Parse Server, allowing the Parse API to run on a developer's own Node.js server.
Parse hasn't been doing too well since its CEO and co-founder Ilya Sukhar left Facebook a year ago. That's when the service fell off the radar for a while, until now of course, as the company admits that it needs to focus its resources elsewhere.
Unfortunately, there are 600,000 apps built on the platform that developers will now have to migrate over to somewhere else. That kind of drastic change will certainly leave them with a sour taste in the mouth, making it more difficult for Facebook to attract developers to latch onto new platforms it plans to create in the future.
Amazon, Google and Microsoft already offer similar tools for developers anyway so it's not like there will be nowhere else to turn. However, Facebook has taken similar actions before and ended up damaging its relations with developers. Parse's closure certainly won't be one going unnoticed, no matter how much traction it did or didn't get compared to the big boys in the cloud business.
