Parse.com
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Parse was a mobile backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) platform founded in 2011 by Tikhon Bernstam, Ilya Sukhar, Kevin Lacker and James Yu. It gave mobile developers ready-made cloud infrastructure: data storage, push notifications, user management, social integration and analytics, so apps could be built without managing servers. The company was acquired by Facebook in 2013 for about $85 million, and its hosted service peaked at roughly 600,000 apps.
02 / Parse.com FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Facebook closed Parse because the standalone developer platform no longer fit its strategy: it wanted developer resources concentrated on high-impact products in analytics, monetization, discovery and authentication that ran inside the Facebook ecosystem. The paid backend platform faced entrenched competition from Amazon, Microsoft and Google cloud offerings, and the business of selling developer tools made less sense than connecting apps to Facebook's social network.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Tikhon Bernstam, Ilya Sukhar, Kevin Lacker and James Yu found Parse, a backend-as-a-service platform for mobile developers.
- Acquired by Facebook
Facebook acquires Parse for about $85 million to support mobile developers building on its platform.
- Shutdown announced
Facebook announces it will wind down the hosted Parse service over a year, releasing an open-source Parse Server and database migration tools so developers can run their own backends.
- Service retired
The hosted Parse.com service is fully retired on January 28, 2017; the open-source Parse Server continues under a community project.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
In January 2016 Facebook announced a one-year wind-down of the hosted Parse services, ending January 28, 2017.
- 02
Parse open-sourced its server software and shipped database migration tools so apps could move to self-hosted MongoDB instances.
- 03
When the hosted service retired, developers who had not migrated lost access to the hosted backend; no separate financial liquidation was reported.