Many people might have forgotten or not know that when Salesforce started out, they were the lean software [1] that was so much better than the competition. I was using ChangePoint — it sometimes took a few minutes to login (don't ask why, I don't know; But I suppose it's for the same reasons that Jira is horribly slow for some people). The UI was clunky and it was horribly slow.

Salesforce was a breath of fresh air.

PS: I think they were also one of the few cloud-based (rather than on-premise) enterprise offerings in the earlier days which helped got them some customers.

[1] relatively any way.