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Salesforce dooms do.com, just can't do Do.com

Productivity service shuts down in January 2014

Dependent on Do.com? Time to move on. Salesforce is killing the web-based productivity tool it inherited in 2010.

The software-as-a-service provider said the service will shut down on 31 January, 2014.

There was no word from Salesforce on why it’s killing the service but it called the move “a tough decision.”

Salesforce is acting despite an update in February which added to Do.com the ability to synchronise with Google’s Gmail and apps in Drive.

The service allowed you to create, organise, share and re-use projects. Aside from integration with Google, it let you sync calendars, organise groups and share task lists – and it also integrated with social networks and blogs.

The company’s tag line was "get more done, have more fun".

It was built using HTML5 and Ruby on Rails and hosted on Heroku, the platform-cum-company bought by Salesforce for $212m in 2010 and that itself runs on Amazon.

Do.com targeted small businesses and went up against bigger and higher profile rivals such as Office 365, OneNote and SkyDrive from Microsoft. It also tried to carve out a role as middleman between apps and services including DropBox and the Google stack.

The kill order is yet another salutary lesson to those who believe in the beneficence of cloud service providers.

It comes after Google’s unilateral decision to kill RSS Reader earlier this year, a decision which forced people to either export their hairball of feeds or lose them forever.

Salesforce is making an export tool for Do.com users to extract their data before the kill date – the tool will be ready by 15 November.

Data not removed will be deleted from the Salesforce servers shortly after 31 January.

If you’ve paid for an annual subscription, you'll will get your money back on a pro-rata basis and customers on a monthly plan won't be charged from today, 1 November. ®

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