[HN Gopher] What's Salesforce? (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
What's Salesforce? (2019)
Author : eddywebs
Score : 201 points
Date : 2021-05-02 16:39 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (retool.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (retool.com)
| slap_shot wrote:
| I really enjoy these articles. I don't know a ton about Retool,
| but I know these articles are often written by or in the style of
| their Growth analyst, Justin Gage (https://randomshit.dev/) who
| seems to be fantastic at writing articles about what these are
| and how they work in his own right.
|
| These types of posts are a refreshing change from what company
| blogs have become (or maybe always were?): garbage vendor content
| pushing their agenda.
|
| I understand how Retool could be used to do some really cool
| stuff on top of Salesforce, but this post is also just an
| informative expose of an industry giant.
|
| Justin recently did another one about Accenture, whom I worked
| for a while back, and really appreciate the story that is being
| told.
|
| Kudos for these fantastic posts. I look forward to reading these
| every time i see reool.com pop up.
| [deleted]
| gagejustins wrote:
| this is the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me :)
|
| although all credit for this one goes to Taimur!
| Lornedon wrote:
| I'm a pretty new Salesforce admin, and so far it has been a
| horrible experience. Apart from its horribly sluggish user
| experience, developing for it as also very frustrating.
|
| You can't restore backups! You can export your data, but there's
| no way to import it, because you can't set the object Id or
| autonumbered fields (like the case number, which gets
| communicated to the customer). They used to provide an extremely
| expensive recovery service, but they stopped doing that. That's
| just unbelievable for a business product.
|
| I also can't count how many times I looked up an issue and found
| an "Ideas" post that's over ten years old, with 10k upvotes and
| no reaction from Salesforce at all. Id doesn't seem like they
| work on the core product anymore, they just release new things
| that you need a license for.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Its not very promising when you really don't understand the
| biggest player in your space
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| pachico wrote:
| No CTO was ever fired for choosing Salesforce, Jira, Oracle, ...
| protonfish wrote:
| But they should have been.
| pachico wrote:
| I agree
| johnx123-up wrote:
| Previous discussion in 2019 with 234 comments
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277115
| corentin88 wrote:
| Title should include that it's a post from 2019
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This was a great write-up.
|
| I shared it with a friend that recently joined them.
| mtoddsmith wrote:
| My company had 3 instances at one point after acquisitions. Two
| of them got merged so we're stuck with two because of the number
| of customizations and the different sales approaches / teams
| between the two divisions.
|
| One of them upgraded to lightning required by some feature. The
| experience nice with lightning (even slower) has been worse than
| classic. Meanwhile the other instance is till on classic.
|
| We made the mistake of embedding business logic into sales force
| and integrated with their API only later to find out it can take
| upwards of a minute to just convert a lead to a contact via API
| depending on the current load on the system.
|
| Enterprise systems are fun.
| lbj wrote:
| Salesforce is amazing, in the sense that it truly lives up to its
| name. Everytime I've been hired into an executive role I've
| cancelled our Salesforce subscription and productivity has gone
| up.
|
| Its clunky, slow and overly complex if you ask me. But their
| success cannot be denied, thus they must have an amazing
| salesforce.
| anyfactor wrote:
| The world of CRM is so weird.
|
| I worked with Real Estate Agency (<20 employees) and they were
| looking into CRMs. After trying out half a dozen CRMs they
| ended up commissioning a custom one. There is no single CRM out
| there that is designed for you.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Like most highly successful enterprise software companies,
| their focus has definitely shifted to sales. They have the
| budget to fly executives around in their corporate jet and take
| them golfing and schmooze while using all the big talking
| points like "compliance". It's hard for superior, cheaper, but
| smaller products to compete because they have reached that
| "nobody ever got fired for choosing salesforce" stage.
| paulcole wrote:
| > Everytime I've been hired into an executive role
|
| How many times are we talking about here, like 2 or 20? And why
| did you end up leaving those roles?
| truetraveller wrote:
| That was funny!
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| "Everytime I've been hired into an executive role I've
| cancelled our Salesforce subscription and productivity has gone
| up."
|
| ... Great observation. But what did you replace it with?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I did something similar at a smaller scale migrating away
| from Oracle to the Excel spreadsheets in SharePoint that fed
| everything anyway. Lol
| texasbigdata wrote:
| I heard moving into a new home and then immediately burning
| it down to camp in the back yard is great for the
| maximizing your Daily Steps KPI also. This conversation of
| "what I did":"what the outcome was":"what the goal
| was":"what the organization needs to win" seems a bit
| imprecise.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| In my case, the upstream ERP was there for historical
| reasons and literally wasn't used beyond a few reports.
| The old system wasn't modified with the business as it
| grew.
|
| We obviously didn't stay with excel :)
| paulcole wrote:
| This is classic new-hire behavior.
|
| Come in, shake things up by changing a big system to put
| their stamp on things, (no telling if productivity would've
| gone up if nothing had happened, e.g. company was already
| growing), then bounce to the next executive gig before the
| honeymoon wears off.
| fersarr wrote:
| "So he gave Salesforce simple subscription pricing that scaled
| according to usage. In 1999, it was $50/user per month. Software-
| as-a-service (SaaS) was born." I would say that the Bloomberg
| terminal was an earlier example of a SaaS.
| corentin88 wrote:
| The site has a CSS issue that prevents the "Retool" logo to be
| clicked on mobile. If someone from Retool reads this, it's
| related to ".site-header::after" having an absolute positionning
| AFAICT.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| My company had a lot of data in SAP and also a lot of data in
| Salesforce (don't ask me how they decided what to put where).
| Sometimes we need data from one or the other for projects and so
| far it was always that getting SAP data was extremely tedious to
| impossible while getting Salesforce data is usually pretty
| straightforward. I am not sure if that's caused by the teams that
| manage the systems but it's definitely very notiecable.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| Salesforce is a master work of lock-in-as-a-product (LIAAP). The
| best part is that it's not even a good or original product. It's
| success lies in the company's ability to sell a mega package of
| trivial CRM systems to non-technical sales people. It may
| eventually wear thin but it's target demographic is spectacularly
| niche and self-consuming that there's little need to disrupt it.
|
| And while sales people tell other sales people they need
| Salesforce in order to not maintain a software stack of their
| own. Those same other sales people turn around and tell
| developers to maintain integration with the Salesforce APIs.
| throwitaway1235 wrote:
| "Salesforce's point-and-click database editor and drag-and-drop
| UI builder alone make it much more than a CRM. But when you bolt
| on other apps and 3rd-party APIs, it gets close to programming
| without code: a new way to build software."
|
| Seems analogous to Wordpress for building websites, without
| actually knowing how to build websites, yes/no?
| IneffablePigeon wrote:
| Absolutely, it's not a perfect analogy but it's a surprisingly
| good one.
|
| The value is in the sheer size of the ecosystem and the idea of
| everything being plug and play, even if the reality often
| necessitates actual code when you get past the happy demo path
| to your business's weird edge cases.
| maram wrote:
| Interesting to Salesforce is trending in these times
|
| Cannot wait to see "What's Adobe?" =)
| abhishekjha wrote:
| What is adobe though? I have a tough time explaining it to
| people.
|
| I mean is google still just a search engine?
| adzm wrote:
| I understand the appeal of Salesforce, though in my experience it
| is just as clunky and slow as the software it replaced. I'm sure
| there are configurations that are not that way, but it's a
| horrible part of my day to day experience using it as a customer
| support module. Comments take 4 seconds to add. Opening a case in
| a new tab is 30 seconds or more. Comments and feeds load
| progressively, slowly, making it nearly impossible to get to the
| beginning of long discussions. URLs are long and crazy and have
| no useful info or anything cool in them. We've had Salesforce
| consultants and experts come in and gain a second or two here or
| there but it's been an awful experience over the last 5 years.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Is it heavy JS load on the client side, or slow processing on
| server side that causes this sluggishness?
| bigfudge wrote:
| I think it's probably both. The api and db querying are dog
| slow too.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| Yeah, I'm definitely not convinced there are configurations of
| salesforce that aren't terrible. Other products that are often
| configured terribly I've generally seen an example or two of
| one that actually was better, but I've never seen a salesforce
| that wasn't slow as molasses.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| It's slow and the UI is stuck in 1999 unless you pay extra for
| what they sell as the more modern UI, which takes you from 20+
| years behind to only like 5 years outdated.
| iratewizard wrote:
| Lighting is free. The only time you have to pay more is to
| get custom pieces of your system built in classic rebuilt. In
| what ways are lightning's UI "5 years outdated?"
| wnevets wrote:
| But it's enterprise software and real companies use enterprise
| software, so if we use it we'll also be a real company!
| vbsteven wrote:
| Had similar experiences with Netsuite and to a lesser extent
| Jira. So many layers of configuration options and hooks make
| everything super extensible, but it comes at a a cost and that
| cost is usually performance.
| tootie wrote:
| Once an enterprise reaches a certain level of scale that
| amount of complexity is almost unavoidable. Tools like
| Salesforce and JIRA are great for providing the needed
| flexibility within guard rails and a shared vernacular.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Netsuite is stuck 30 years ago at least. So painful and
| insanely slow. It's like having dial up again.
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| Which ERP isn't?
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Yup, the "enterprise" software space is generally incredibly
| expensive _and_ buggy _and_ a poor user experience, and there
| is nothing anyone has ever been able to do about it, as firms
| want custom code just for them, and so the development
| /maintenance cost can't be leveraged over millions of
| customers all getting the same software like the B2C space.
| So given that the market is 3 orders of magnitude smaller,
| you have a choice of adding 2 orders of magntitude to the
| cost, and decreasing quality by 1 order of magnitude, or some
| other combination of this. That leaves you with a few
| options:
|
| 1. Don't allow businesses to customize at all, make them fit
| to you. That can work with something like ADP, but little
| else. A lot of the cool B2B startups think they can displace
| incumbents by just building cool, fast software, and then
| they are perplexed why they can't gain marketshare when every
| other customer has some bespoke use case they don't support.
|
| 2. Build a general uber-programmable platform that businesses
| can customize themselves -- now you are in the "slow", "poor
| user experience" territory but at least it works and is
| cheaper than option 3
|
| 3. Hire consultants to write bespoke products from scratch
| for each business. That's the old IBM Services model.
|
| So if your baseline is Microsoft Office, then the
| performance/user experience of your favorite online B2B
| platform is going to be terrible. But if your baseline is IBM
| Services, then it's a godsend.
| aik wrote:
| Love this comment. My company is rebuilding our EHR
| software right now to make it more customizable among other
| things. Know any good resources on making the right
| architectural and product decisions to protect against or
| prevent this eventual fate?
| lobotryas wrote:
| Yes. Hire an architect with a proven track record and
| significant experience and give them the responsibility.
| Reading a few medium articles or an O'Reily book won't be
| a substitute.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| My general advice is not so much about the software as
| controlling your corporate appetite for customization.
| There is just an incredible cost to bespoke
| customization, while the use cases of it are often things
| like executives' vanity at getting live dashboards or
| something else. You can have an in-house team build some
| forms atop a database, and you can even make that work,
| but only if you rigidly fight feature creep. If you can't
| fight the feature creep, might as well go with one of the
| big solutions so that features are reflected in bottom
| line costs and have to explicitly be paid for out of your
| business budget, rather than implemented by making
| requests of your in-house dev team.
| jozzy-james wrote:
| no, they just do it horribly - there is no reason to tank
| perf. it's a system built by consultants, for consultants -
| aka the people that don't know how to actually do it.
| eloisant wrote:
| Honestly most businesses think they need a lot of
| customization because they think they're oh-so-special, but
| in fact something like 1) would work great for them. I
| know, I've worked in consulting and built software for
| companies who would have been better off with an off-the-
| shelf solution.
| abraae wrote:
| Someone told me way back in time that in the ERP sales
| process, your two top answers are:
|
| Q: Can your system do X?
|
| A: Yes (doesn't matter what the question is, or that an
| entire add-on would have to be built that could never be
| cost justified).
|
| Q: As a company we do things like this, will your system
| work?
|
| A: Yes, our product works with your process, no matter what
| it is.
|
| I have observed this to be true. Customers particularly
| love the second one, so telling someone that they must
| change their process to work with your super simple un-
| customizable product can often be a deal-breaker.
| rvanmil wrote:
| Choose 3 and then watch the consultants build the custom
| software using a low/no code platform. Now you are still in
| the slow and poor user experience _and_ no customization
| options _and_ more expensive _and_ worse support ;-)
|
| I think it's pretty sad that enterprise software is mostly
| stuck the way you describe. There are companies willing to
| invest in fast and user friendly custom software though;
| the company I work for is pretty successful at doing just
| that.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| All companies in this space start out fast and user
| friendly, but to gain additional customers in this space
| they need to add more features. See my first item. Then
| they either fail or end up an uber-platform. Again, this
| has nothing to do with your company, it is just the
| nature of the market, and it's funny when someone gets an
| idea to start a "lean", "fast" product as if no one else
| had thought of that before.
|
| Really if you think you can do better than X, whether X
| is oracle forms or SAP or whatnot, it's important to
| understand where X went wrong. Hint: it's very rarely
| because they were "old-fashioned" or didn't realize that
| customers liked fast software that was easy to use. The
| founders of X were just as smart/capable as you are, but
| they faced a market challenge and made some choices with
| trade offs. If you limit your analysis to "they didn't
| know software should be fast", then you are not going to
| end up any better than they are once you reach their
| scale. I am not trying to say that every incumbent always
| made the right choices. But an understanding of where
| they went wrong needs to go beyond "they went wrong
| because they are old fashioned" or "they went wrong
| because they didn't realize software shouldn't be filled
| with bugs". There are real hard problems here that need
| to be understood before you are in a position to improve
| on what the incumbents are doing.
| jozzy-james wrote:
| honestly if 'fast' is your metric - they'd not be on
| windows
| rvanmil wrote:
| I agree, it's their business priorities which result in
| engineering that leads to bad software. What I'm saying
| is you can choose to _not_ buy into one of those uber-
| programmable enterprise platforms and instead (let
| someone) build fast and user friendly specific software
| just for your needs. All of the customization and dynamic
| crap can go out of the window that way, which will allow
| engineers to make things fast and user friendly again.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| The problem is that the definition of "just for your
| needs" lasts about a year, max, and then your needs
| change. Businesses are constantly re-organizing and
| engaging in process engineering, and this creates rapidly
| changing needs. Go through this a few times and at some
| point you will get the bright idea that you need to
| create some DSL/platform metaframework to allow customers
| to auto-configure what "just for your needs" means or
| else you will be buried in a pile of feature requests
| that your tool doesn't have but the competitor does. And
| then third parties will come along and you'll want to
| package their work to create pluggable tools that
| customers can install. Then you'll spin up app store.
|
| Then throw in all the regulatory and compliance stuff
| that businesses need to trust storing their data with
| you. Add EU regulations and you will end up building data
| centers in different parts of the world. Then you will
| want to spin up training to use your custom DSP. And
| localization packs. Then you will need APIs to pull data
| in and out as customers will fear lock-in and they'll
| want you to integrate nicely with some other service.
| Then you have to figure out how those APIs work with your
| metalanguage. Then other customers will demand the
| ability to reskin everything with their corporate logos,
| custom login screens, support for SMS and two factor
| auth, support for third party identity providers, scripts
| to enroll/unenroll users, admins will want scripting
| platforms to manage all the complexity created by adding
| the other features, Etc.
| pjmlp wrote:
| You forgot the other part, to make business in the
| enterprise it matters more to talk to the right people
| than what the software actually does, and the large
| majority of such companies see anything IT related as
| cost center.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| URL's is probably one thing that Salesforce solved well, at
| least in classic - you're always routed to the right page by 15
| character ID.
| stevebmark wrote:
| This is a good article and history is Salesforce. Another shorter
| developer focused perspective: Salesforce is a relational
| database editor. You can create tables, columns, and
| relationships, app in a nice UI without writing code. You get
| automatic views and edit forms for records in the tables. And the
| whole thing is built on a platform where you can write custom
| sandboxed code to manipulate those records, or expose them over
| APIs to external systems.
|
| The platform is both powerful and pretty clunky. Salesforce
| development is consistently 20 years behind established best
| practices. Learning Salesforce means learning the thousands of
| limitations and broken parts of the ecosystem. And it's non
| transferable knowledge.
| spamalot159 wrote:
| AirTable is also a relational database editor with a nice UI. I
| don't know if you could compare the two though.
| brd529 wrote:
| You can. Airtable is what salesforce would look like if it
| were built today. Because CRM is so dominated by salesforce
| though, Airtable's defaults are not CRM and it doesn't market
| itself as such.
| unixhero wrote:
| I want to add. Not 100% non transferrable. I was able to
| deliver a project on Service Now without any Service Now
| training, using my Salesforce architecture background.
| delusional wrote:
| So it's Django?
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| To use Django like this you need'd at least a handful of
| Django devs writing the models, frontend views, and api views
| as code.
| adwww wrote:
| Sounds cheaper than a SF license + consultant tbh.
| bigfudge wrote:
| You would likely get something faster and nicer to use
| too, but you can't just do it once ... you need to keep
| moving because otherwise the team shrinks and you lose
| the expertise to make even smaller changes. That
| stagnation is what kills a lot of custom systems.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| I'll sprinkle that Salesforce employees have a huge pledge not
| to break your software as they update it 3 times a year.
|
| On flip side, meticulous saving of cpu and memory means your
| solutions are super constrained. You need to do all sort of
| tricks like 90s game programmer and still can run yourself into
| corner on larger systems. Back end is supremely unevolved -
| their serverless functions have been in beta forever and apex
| is like 20 years old Java.
| stevekemp wrote:
| It always puts me in mind of Lotus Notes, another "no-code"
| system which users locked themselves into.
| echelon wrote:
| Sounds like it could be disrupted by focusing on a subset of
| the market and growing up into something without the baggage?
|
| A calcified org like that can't move fast.
| mrlatinos wrote:
| That's already happening, and it's causing further
| fragmentation, so now companies are investing in "IPaaS"
| tools to merge their data. Which creates even more non-
| transferable knowledge. It seems customer and marketing data
| is a mess because marketers will invest in every shiny new
| tool that promises "actionable insights" from a mountain of
| data. As terrible as Salesforce may be, it's not as bad as
| Salesforce + Segment + Informatica + Looker + Lotame +
| etc.... But that's the world digital advertising has created.
| Anything for an extra click.
| lumost wrote:
| Each extra tool provides a date for a date when marketing
| will be useful. As a pm I was told that we couldn't
| advertise because our marketing integration wasn't done.
|
| A CMO can go from shop to shop delivering nothing but
| broken ad tech integrations with the job of fixing the mess
| from the last person.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| I was pretty sure Firebase was in a position to kill
| Salesforce's platform, but I guess they never sold it as
| business platform (plus Google wood never be able to execute
| human Sales and Support at Salesforce scale)
| penciltwirler wrote:
| I think Zendesk has taken over the CRM part of Salesforce.
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| Man, I would use Zendesk just because they have better UI,
| SF UI is very crowded.
| spamalot159 wrote:
| You're right and I think people have tried but nobody has
| made a killer product yet. Everyone is either trying to copy
| Salesforce or too niche.
| leeoniya wrote:
| in my experience, every vendor we looked at who competes
| with salesforce is not interested in your business unless
| they are allowed to take over your entire backoffice. for
| example, we only wanted it for the CRM and order ingestion
| via manual entry & API, and that was okay, while other
| vendors insisted on also taking over our inventory
| management, invoicing, fulfillment, etc, rather than
| allowing us to simply integrate with the minimal set of
| APIs which we needed to sync our systems with theirs.
| hubspotthrow wrote:
| Give Hubspot a gander. We _want_ to handle your entire
| front office. But we 're also perfectly content just
| handling customer data and gdpr requests for you.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I will say that I feel better about our clients
| underusing a $2500/quarter HubSpot account than I do
| about our clients wasting $100k+ on Salesforce Pardot.
| edoceo wrote:
| Yuck. Hubspot is the "CRM" all my sales people hate (they
| currently like Pipe...something).
|
| also, "advice" from a new, shill, throwaway account?
| pass.
| hubspotthrow wrote:
| Well I was specifically responding to someone who
| couldn't find a salesforce replacement because they all
| wanted to manage the back office. So it seemed relevant
| rather than shilling in my eyes.
|
| Sorry to hear your team dislikes Hubspot.
| clairity wrote:
| from gp:
|
| > "...they currently like Pipe...something"
|
| probably pipedrive. it's pretty good for small sales (and
| some marketing) groups to manage their pipelines. easy to
| get up and running and fairly flexible for what it is.
| it's not going to replace salesforce though.
|
| hubspot is a mid-market marketing automation product,
| sitting between little pipedrive and huge salesforce.
| it's also pretty decent for what it is, helping medium-
| size marketing (and some sales) departments coordinate
| across various channels. it also won't replace
| salesforce, but is appropriate for a mid-tier company
| (maybe ~$20-200MM in revenue).
|
| salesforce is a huge sales channel management platform
| with at least a couple marketing automation products
| bolted onto it, along with all sorts of other semi-
| related stuff, like SCM (supply chain mgmt). this is
| because they want to own the totality of "marketing",
| which encompasses all of product, price, promotion, and
| distribution.
|
| (i've done some consulting in this area and have helped
| clients pick and set up these things)
| aik wrote:
| I would love to have a chat with you - my company is in
| the middle of trying to decide on what route to go right
| now. We're on Zoho right now and trying to make it work.
| Available for a chat?
| hubspotthrow wrote:
| Note that the person I originally responded to (hopefully
| helpfully) is different than the person who took offense.
| ansgri wrote:
| How's that really different from MS Access?
| brd529 wrote:
| It's not unreasonable to say Salesforce was MS Access /
| Filemaker in the cloud, and the cloud made all the
| difference.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| A lot of the value is the access control part of that. You can
| set up a role hierarchy and/or groups and only see the records
| you're supposed to have access to when you query. Plus
| configuration of what fields different user types have access
| to.
|
| The downside of that is it means every query, no matter how
| simple, is a join against multiple internal tables to enforce
| those rules.
| ghaff wrote:
| Pre-pandemic, Dreamforce--which is basically Salesforce's user
| and partner show was one of the largest trade shows in the tech
| industry. I think they were up to about 120,000 attendees or
| something like that because a huge amount of work goes into
| customizing Salesforce for a specific business.
| alex_anglin wrote:
| On the other hand, ERPs and associated systems tend to
| involve a huge amount of work too.
| ghaff wrote:
| Sure. And Oracle World and Sapphire are big shows too.
| JCM9 wrote:
| The trouble with Salesforce is that it's turned into the very
| thing they set out to replace. It's big, unwieldy, clunky, and
| frustrating to use.
|
| It's "SaaS" which was an upgrade on what they replaced initially,
| but seems like they're increasingly the ones bound to be
| "disrupted."
| joshribakoff wrote:
| Retool recently released "modules", and it made me think the
| same thing, that this is one step closer to the thing they're
| trying to replace.
|
| Resolving merge conflicts in json (which is what defines a
| retool app) is another area where the benefits of "yes code"
| become more obvious. "No code" is not something I'm convinced
| is good. I personally think embracing code (but making it
| optional) leads to a platform more developers would enjoy
|
| To pick on salesforce a bit, notice how the example of how to
| define the drop down they are using XML. That's not "no code",
| it's just a constrained form of coding. Basically any library
| or framework that embraces code can also offer higher level
| abstractions just like Retool or Salesforce, without having to
| have the "no code" part to solve the problem. "No code" is also
| tangential to being a saas product, these tools could work more
| like codesandbox than dreamweaver or frontpage, for example.
| Firehawke wrote:
| Scope creep from hell.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Nothing against Salesforce but please don't call it a software
| company. They are not a software company but rather an investor.
| They invest and acquire other companies. The majority of their
| revenues still come from their investments rather than their
| products. To their credit they have been doing some great
| investments over the years, but they have no capabilities of
| building anything themselves.
|
| Now, I know all tech companies buy other companies. That's not
| new. But most tech companies also have some capabilities to
| innovate and building new stuff. That's an important difference.
| Buying a small tech company to accelerate development of a
| particular product is different than buying a company like Slack
| which already dominates the market and can be integrated into the
| eco system and then transition to mostly maintenance.
| slap_shot wrote:
| Why can't they be both? They literally are a software company.
| And yes, they acquire other software companies.
|
| Plenty of companies in other industries (e.g. consumer goods)
| are conglomerates, often a result of acquisitions - it doesn't
| make them pure "investors."
| tinyhouse wrote:
| I don't argue they are qualified to be called a software
| company. They make money from software after all (at least
| partly). But they are not a software company in the sense
| that they don't build technology. Their specialty is buying
| and selling software and investing in software companies
| (check one of their 10-K filings). For me personally they are
| not a software company since building software is not their
| core business. They operate the same way pure investors
| operate, with the difference they often buy an entire company
| rather than just owning a subset of the company (but they do
| both).
|
| Update: I see my original comment is getting downvoted. I
| knew I'm going to upset some sensitive Salesforce employees
| here :)
| jjeaff wrote:
| So do they really not do any development in house to speak
| of? Or do you just mean it isn't their core competency?
| jzoch wrote:
| they have many many software engineers this guy is lying
| Jach wrote:
| As a former employee (and not one acqui-hired) I don't
| know how you could say they're not a "software company",
| but I did say something similar during my time that I
| still stand by which is they're not really a "tech
| company" in the way
| Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon/Google/Apple are. They do have
| a few thousands of in-house devs working on "core"
| products, and lots of other devs from various large
| acquisitions (e.g. Heroku) mostly separated from that,
| there's a good deal of tech and some smart engineers, but
| I'd still call them a marketing or sales company instead.
| This distinction is mostly only relevant to programmers
| in that it describes and predicts an internal mindset for
| how problems are approached and how budgets are
| allocated. It's hard to describe without examples I don't
| really want to get in to, but as an illustration you
| could make an axis with one end being clearly a tech
| company like Facebook and the other being not a tech
| company like Walmart (despite Walmart having some
| impressive tech/smart engineers). Salesforce sits quite a
| bit further away from the tech end than people think.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| @jjeaff Of course they do development. They have software
| engineers and buy real software companies with software
| engineers. Someone needs to maintain all the software they
| keep integrating into their eco-system (some products which
| they acquire remain independent). But their business model
| is to expand by buying or investing in other companies.
| They don't invest in building new stuff in house. Partly
| because they don't really have the capabilities to build
| something like Slack for example that would dominate the
| market.
| altacc wrote:
| Salesforce do tend to buy a company and then brand that
| company's products as part of Salesforce. The result is a mess.
| Want the same data in your marketing cloud than your core?
| Nope, it's a different database and data model and true syncing
| of data can be a nightmare. What you're left with is the same
| as if you'd bought products from 5 different companies and
| built an integration layer to tie them together. Funnily
| enough, Salesforce has had to build an data integration
| platform to help untangle its mess of acquisitions and of
| course the customer has to pay extra to use it.
| TruthWillHurt wrote:
| I'm always amazed at how the simplest solutions have the biggest
| impact on business users.
|
| Us devs often try to invent groundbreaking software, while all
| they needed was to automate a rollodex...
| spamalot159 wrote:
| I'm just waiting for Salesforce to be disrupted. It has become so
| large and all encompassing that it is hard to get into for the
| lower end. Seems like a ripe area for a low end competitor but I
| haven't seen anything great yet.
| Phurist wrote:
| Does Pipedrive work ?
| joezydeco wrote:
| That's what Excel is for.
|
| I'm only half joking.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| That's a tall hill to climb.
|
| Not because it's hard to make a better product, many already
| exist. But because it's engrained into the DNA that makes up an
| enterprise. At some point you just buy Salesforce. Not because
| you need it, or even because you want it. It just manifests
| itself. You don't get fired for buying Salesforce.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Having evaluated dozens of CRMs to replace my company's
| internally built system, here's my five cents:
|
| - Salesforce is slow, expensive after adding add-ons, costly to
| customize, and visually unappealing. The older and less tech-
| friendly workers I've surveyed found it painful to use. The
| same might be said of many Salesforce competitors, including
| MSFT Dynamics and Netsuite. SugarCRM also has many of the same
| failings, but its UI/UX is better IMHO.
|
| - Close.io, Pipedrive, Salesloft, Nethunt, Nutshell, Nimble and
| few others have a simpler and more engaging take on CRM that
| seems to be easier for a wider variety of users to adopt.
|
| - A big chunk of CRM's perceived value is better found through
| sales training that focuses on qualifying customers and good
| work habits.
|
| - CRM cannot turn most under or non-performing salespeople into
| performers.
|
| - Many performing workers will resist adding contacts and data
| to a CRM for several reasons, self-preservation instinct being
| most prominent.
|
| - Nurture marketing, once a CRM innovation, has become an
| annoyance for client/customer prospects... particularly over
| email.
|
| - Predictive CRM requires either a lot of data to train, or
| hard to obtain signals. The concept underachieves.
|
| The next great thing may very well be inversion of CRM, whereby
| your customers/clients automate the acquisition, evaluation,
| negotiation and purchase of products or services. At the
| enterprise level this exists for commodity products & services,
| but it's largely non-existent at the SMB/SOHO level. The
| normalization and quantification problem is significant, but
| I'm confident ML will address some of these challenges in due
| time.
|
| Tl;dr ... there's still no substitute for hiring the right
| people. Charisma, emotional intelligence & motivation always
| surpasses sales automation.
| totololo wrote:
| SOHO: Small Office / Home Office (I had to look it up)
| EricE wrote:
| Act! back in the 90's right around the time Symantec bought them.
| Seemed to be just about perfect for what most small businesses
| would need. Out of nostalgia I did some searching and the amount
| of times it changed hands and what they are charging (per month!)
| for it now I can only imagine - it's probably as heavyweight or
| more so than SalesForce.
|
| Salesforce just has a weird flow. I think I have the gist of it,
| but man do you have to use it for quite a while before it starts
| to make sense - all while you wait and wait and wait for anything
| to happen after you submit something. Ugh.
| azure10 wrote:
| Company is moving away from salesforce and I don't regret it
| kamyarg wrote:
| Can you share the reasoning? How was the "cost" of migration
| justified vs. <insert problems with Salesforce>?
| fizx wrote:
| Workday is also a CRUD app-builder, but for HR professionals.
|
| What other typical company functions have this sort of provider?
|
| Conversely, what other company functions need this sort of
| provider?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Every function. Shipping/receiving, field service, mailing,
| facility management.
|
| Cruddy apps like Servicenow and Salesforce are goldmines for
| process management. All you need to do is be marginally better
| than Oracle/etc.
| te_chris wrote:
| Salesforce is a full business app development platform with
| almost unmatched flexibility, fully hosted and programmable. CRM
| doesn't really begin to cover it.
|
| This reads like I'm a zealot. I'm not. But there is nothing that
| I've seen that can do what it can do and, if you know how it
| works, you can leverage it for incredible time and efficiency
| savings for developing and deploying business apps.
| chaostheory wrote:
| The most interesting thing in this post was that Mark worked for
| Apple in 1984 and stayed in good terms with Jobs long enough so
| that he was still Benioff's mentor in the 2000s before Jobs died
| inthewoods wrote:
| I've used Salesforce at every company I've worked at for the last
| 8 years. Here are my observations:
|
| - There is a special place in hell for the person who made the
| decision to have leads and contacts as separate objects. It
| creates all kinds of complexity. Some may have a need to work
| with leads but for clean reporting, you almost have to dump
| leads. Most B2B companies I know don't use the lead object and
| autoconvert everything to Contacts. But it has always seemed like
| a bad decision to have both.
|
| - There is a long line of companies that have tried and are
| trying to disrupt Salesforce - none have succeed and my take is
| that this is because of the ecosystem and app exchange. That
| makes it very challenging to overcome.
|
| - Salesforce has made improvements in their interface (Lightning
| is, by most counts, an improvement), but an entire industries
| exists to make up for the shortcomings of Salesforce. Sending
| emails directly or programmatically is pain, so we have Outreach
| and Salesloft. Entering data is too slow - so there's Dooly.
| Their marketing reporting stinks - so there is Fullcircle and
| Bizible. They own Pardot, yet somehow still can't top Marketo,
| Hubspot or Eloqua - which is a pretty amazing fail imho. And the
| Pardot integration really doesn't add a ton of value over other
| solutions. But as noted above, this weakness is also a strength
| because you've got a huge ecosystem.
|
| If I'm starting a company right now, I'd probably go with Hubspot
| because there is just enormous power in the simplicity of having
| all of the data for both marketing and sales in a single system.
| Not that Hubspot doesn't have it's own issues, but reporting has
| always been a huge problem at every company so if I can't avoid
| this pain even a little, I'd consider it a big win.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Whether Salesforce intended it or not, the platform has moved
| far beyond just Sales. In the multitude of cloud products
| currently available, almost all of them use the Contact object
| as something other than a lead. So I guess from my point of
| view, a Lead can always be a Contact that is captured/not, but
| a Contact may not necessarily be a "lead", in the traditional
| sense of word anyways.
|
| Given that Salesforce is the only CRM I know in my fairly young
| career, I can definitely see many of its shortcomings and do
| not envy the engineers/product managers that have to address
| those.
|
| I think if someone is starting a company, Salesforce is not the
| right option, both because it is extremely expensive, and its
| not exactly plug and play if you're looking for customizations.
| inthewoods wrote:
| The way I think about it is that Lead is a stage of a
| Contact, not a separate object.
| diveanon wrote:
| I'm conflicted on Salesforce.
|
| As a user I am firmly in the camp that believes it is garbage to
| use and overpriced.
|
| As a developer and contractor it paid for my first home.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Retool also had a great post in the past demystifying what SAP
| is: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/
|
| It's amazing content in an otherwise opaque category of
| enterprise software and services, which are so strongly embedded
| in part because no one knows what they do and how they're used in
| practice.
| mangopi wrote:
| What is Salesforce?
|
| JAVA BY AVON
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Probably I'm not getting the joke, but Sf actually uses a
| language called Apex on top of Java on the backend I believe.
| mym1990 wrote:
| I have been working on the Salesforce platform for about 3 years
| now, and it has been a pretty enlightening experience(good and
| bad). It has certainly been lucrative as well. I would say that a
| lot of the issues around Salesforce stem from how easy it is to
| write or configure a terrible solution. Something that looks like
| it works but is so far from any sort of optimization.
|
| Much of Salesforce implementation development also goes unvetted
| by the client. I have worked and currently work on projects where
| I constantly ask 'how did this ever make it into production...and
| how has no one noticed that this is hot garbage for 4 years'.
| Eventually someone digs deep enough and whoever is managing that
| project at the time gets the brunt of the blame unfortunately...
| kh1 wrote:
| Is it just me or does the Apex screenshot look better than many
| enterprise websites we see nowadays?
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| It's just you. It's not terrible but looks like something out
| of the 90s and has a "detergent newspaper ad" vibe to it.
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