Part of the reason this year has been a bit of a mess is because MDG has been focusing a lot of resources on the profit-generating component of their business: meteor hosting and support. They launched Galaxy (their hosting service) just a couple months ago so it's still too early to say how successful that will be, but it could easily be in their best interests to cannibalize some of their older features if it helps to grow their userbase. For example, not having to spend developer resources on Blaze might enable them to get SQL support out the door sooner. I'm cautiously optimistic for them but wouldn't be too surprised either if they were still struggling next year.
Not having to spend money on Blaze will make them more competitive as a hosting business. Frankly, when is the last time you saw a billion dollar unicorn hosting business? Or a hosting IPO?
I doubt we will see SQL support. We will likely see something with GraphQL instead.
Heroku is probably the closest case study, in that they started as (and mostly remained in the popular conscience) a Ruby on Rails host. I believe they sold for $200+ million. Not a "unicorn", but not a small exit, for such a short period of time. They were only around as an independent company for a few years.
As a developer who is only using them for a personal project so far, I don't care one way or the other if they are incapable of becoming a unicorn - I just want them to be profitable enough to continue developing the framework. They may be under too much pressure from their investors to go that route, but wasn't hosting MDG's monetization plan from the beginning? If so, savvy investors would already know the likelihood of unicornization was low/zero when they invested.
You're certainly much more in the loop about SQL/GraphQL. Would GraphQL allow non-mongo databases to push updates out to clients for reactive updates?
Thanks for running Crater.io - I've been reading it a lot recently!
