What's Salesforce? (2021) | Hacker News Reader

What's Salesforce? (2021)

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52 pointsrrampage41 comments

It's an 'enterprise' thing.

What's an enterprise thing?

The most simple tasks are unnecessarily complex. Janky and slow UI that is at least 10 years behind in terms of web norms. It uses its own proprietary versions of standard languages like SOQL, APEX, Lightning, Visualforce instead of SQL, Java/Groovy/Kotlin/Scala/etc., Angular/React/Vue/etc., and HTML/CSS. Absurd data and API limitations for the kind of product it purports to be. Confusing terminology and multiple tools that do the same thing. Buggy IDE and REST implementation. Poor and/or convoluted integrations. Eye-watering license costs. So yeah, classic 'enterprise' product.

On the plus side, it's not as terrible as most other enterprise CRM solutions that somehow manage to be even worse.

That explains nothing. What problem does the product solve for enterprise, to make it worth the pain?

Why don't enterprise customers then do the sane thing that is so obvious to you?

It enables sales & marketing teams to customise their workflows, capture their vital information on leads and contacts, produce reports, etc. It just has the mindshare and brand to capture the attention of most of the decision-makers in large firms and at the scale they operate, it kind of became the de facto market leader because of inertia and the expense of migrating and retraining to other tools.

What are the tools would you suggest large firms migrate to?

There are no better alternatives. Salesforce is at the top of the league, all the others are catching up at best.

That's the thing. There really isn't really anything better. I've used at least a dozen CRM systems. Some fairly good, easy to use, innovative even, but few manage to have the full capabilities of SF. of the anecdotes I've heard about large migrations away from SF, it's been to Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Hubspot, which seem to be the main contenders ATM.

I had to make a web app sync with Salesforce a couple years back, and walked away with a similar impression. It’s like every awful idea that the rest of the industry discarded quietly made a home there (remember SOAP?).

One particular gem: the platform prides itself on extreme flexibility of metadata, the ability to throw together new columns and tables to suit any need. One atomic data object is an address (street city state zip nation), every Person entry in the database could have one. In the company I was working for, it was very common for the customers (rich people) to have multiple homes, so I was tasked with adding support for that. It turned out that the ability to have multiple address units for a user was a “just around the corner” feature for fifteen years with no end in sight…

Salesforce belongs in the bonfire with Internet Explorer 6 and AOL.

Just create an "Address" custom object, duh.

But it has thousands of features that you can't just rewrite in technology-du-jour. This is why it's important to pick standard solutions for any new project, instead of whatever is cool these days. That does mean it might be better to just pick angular or whatever.

I've been the CTO for a small Salesforce consulting agency for the last 10 years ( most of my time is actually working as an "architect").

Salesforce is really just a cloud based database with a UI slapped on top of it (for both administration and end users).

- New Tables and Columns can be added via a Web UI without any downtime.

- Business processes can be automated using custom "apex code" (a ripoff of java 1.6) and "visual code" workflow engines.

- UI/Layouts can be customized via drag and drop editors and a "Web Component" framework (LWC).

- The user security model is robust (Record level access, Field level access & record sharing rules)

- There is a pretty solid REST API that is updated in realtime to reflect your models.

- The entire org configuration is defined as deployable "metadata" (XML).

All this makes it extremely easy to model business processes and quickly build business 'apps'.

However, building anything of significant complexity becomes extremely expense very quickly. And once you've built critical processes into salesforce, you are forever vendor locked.

The Salesforce Account Manager's goal is to raise total subscription cost 7% with every contract renewal, even if your needs have not changed. They can typically accomplish this by offering your free features early on, letting you become dependent on them and then taking them away if you do not pay more.

Do SAP and IBM not do the same?

Probably? I only mentioned it because it's far too common for small companies to become dependent on Salesforce, only to then be priced out of the platform as their costs balloon with their needs.

SAP is primarily an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) product. Salesforce does not have an ERP product.

ERP’s are operational efficiency tools that companies use. Core components of ERPs are financial (automating accounting), inventory, transportation management (finding the best route to get physical products from China to the USA for example), amongst other modules.

Some ERP companies have CRMs (Oracle Netsuite I know for sure does), but again Salesforce doesn’t.

I thought I was going to learn something.

Then I realized, "wait, this is the end and I still don't know what Salesforce is".

App stores were mentioned, SaaS, "The Cloud", no-code, all these buzzwords apparently originated with Salesforce, so...what?

In retrospect, the bit about "SOQL" reminds me of the "it goes to 11" quote from Spinal Tap.

What's SOQL? Well, it's like SQL. Why is it better? Well, it's got one more letter.

"Like a database, Salesforce lets you create new tables with custom columns and relationships, complete with data types and constraints."

Ahhhh...like SharePoint?

"Salesforce’s point-and-click database editor and drag-and-drop UI builder"

Aha, like MS Access?

"Visualforce, a component-based UI framework that made it easy to build custom interfaces for Salesforce. Its simple markup let developers build UIs"

Oh, like HTML?

"And this Apex controller code would fetch the list of objects from the organization’s schema"

Like Javascript!

Now try running your sales team with MS Access, Sharepoint, HTML, and JavaScript. Your sales force will quit not long after. Remember, the sales org is a profit center and IT is a cost center. Salespeople want to track leads and close opportunities without worrying if the VBA scripting of Sharepoint integration with MS Access worked.

You make a valid point, but in my (albeit limited) experience its not that much better with Salesforce. Plenty of downtime and/or hidden data integration issues.

What Salesforce does better is “hide” the integrations between a web interface, but in the end it’s just replacing one set of problems for another.

But "your sales team" isn't going to be writing code in these crazy parallel universe languages mentioned in the article any more than Javascript and SQL.

And obviously Access and VBA aren't new and shiny enough, have been left to wither, and low/no code is the in thing, so Microsoft has a grab- (garbage?) bag of new stuff. Like Power Automate and Azure and I don't know what all.

FYI, Sharepoint doesn't require VBA in any way. Obviously if you're using the REST interface, that can be accessed from almost anything, although you probably don't want to. But you can also access an object model with a regular web page that's much more convenient.

> I still don't know what Salesforce is

“Salesforce is the most popular CRM in the industry.” It’s like the second paragraph of TFA.

I know people who work at Salesforce, and I learned some things from this article.

Ah yes, "Customer relationship management", everyone knows exactly what that is.

people don’t explain exactly what a database is, why would a common business software need explanation?

If you're familiar with CRMs you wouldn't be asking what Salesforce is, in the same way that if you were familiar with databases you wouldn't be asking what SQL is.

"Customer relationship management" - which is basically "manage sales and marketing".

Which is a huge problem in organisations of all sizes.

I might be biased here (having worked on a CRM before), but it does sound like the old joke about "What's an Internet Service Provider?" to me.

...It's a provider for your internet service. The explanation isn't going to get any easier than that.

A CRM is where you manage the relation to your customers - whatever that means depends on the vendor and customizations. Run analytics who to upsell to, send marketing material to, get reminded that a customer's subscription is running out, ....

Right. It isn’t clear to me why a CRM needs an entire application builder inside.

I work with Salesforce. Application builder in Salesforce means adding standard and custom objects ( db tables) and additional components ( widgets) to a single 'app'. All these components come with tons of standard features ( e.g. suggestion engine tied to sales process) and more can be built on top of it. For instance, I was sick and tired of the sales team manually updating lead records, so I've created a component that would query an address database based on the postcode entered and would update the records automatically.

Customization. Every company has their own processes, procedures, etc. that are just a little bit different. Often they track data elements specific to their industry.

SOQL is like ssql, but worse! No joins, no unique, no returning more than 2000 results at a time.

Visual force is like java server pages, but worse because it injects all sort of stuff into the rendered page like these wierd ids, stop you from using a lot of basic html between the visual force tags.

And finally, they have been pushing so hard for their redesigned UI , lightning. Problem is that it is much much slower than the old pages by a lot.

You actually have a better understanding of "what it is" than most Salesforce admins.

It's everything for everyone that they can sell licenses to.

Disclaimer: I’m a salesforce employee (though relatively new one)

Salesforce (the app), Jira, Peoplesoft, SAP, etc… are all platforms/apps for business that provide you entities, custom fields for those entities, a web interface, reports, and some other things (workflows). They are really just all moving towards being generic app platforms but in almost cases also provide you with a default app/workflows/entities.

How they implement these platforms, how people develop for them, how they integrate into other products, how much admins you need to run them, what kinds of DR and security they provide, how much code is necessary, payment models, etc.. that is the big differentiator in all of those platforms - and there really is huge differences in all of those.

Salesforce the company is bigger than the app, just as Oracle and Atlassian also are.

Salesforce is a major B2B SaaS company. It’s primary product is an enterprise grade CRM called “Service Cloud” that helps sales companies manage the sales motion journey. It is the de facto standard of CRMs. The success of Service Cloud lead to an expansion that now includes tons of enterprise products that integrate with Service Cloud. Some of their other services are:

Commerce Cloud: Think enterprise grade Shopify. Competes with Oracle Commerce Cloud.

Marketing Cloud: Enterprise grade email service provider.

Customer 360: If you use multiple Salesforce products, you can connect all your customer data together with no integration code in one product.

A perfect client for Salesforce is an e-commerce retail company who’s differentiator is not technology. Casper (mattress company) is a perfect example. They can buy all this technology and avoid hiring a big team of software engineers. Instead they get all the features they need and can hire much cheaper Salesforce Admins / Developers that can easily be offshored.

I have worked with Salesforce for the past 6 years. I was the VP of Engineering at Casper that worked to replace a lot of open source/ customer tech with Salesforce products. A big advantage of this is easier SOX compliance and data security when going though an IPO.

Salesforce's CRM is called Sales Cloud. Service Cloud is their case management and knowledge base product.

I am not convinced that Salesforce admins are cheaper than engineers. Sure you can offshore, but like offshore engineers, you get what you pay for.

I had nearly a 100 person team at Casper. It was Software Engineers, Salesforce professionals, QA, SREs, Data Engineers, ERP professionals, etc. I managed a multi-million dollar budget. I can assure you that Engineers are the most expensive people to hire. Most of my Salesforce team was USA based out of our NYC HQ. A Salesforce Admin makes about half what a mid-level SWE makes and they are much easier to hire. In roles at other companies I had outsourced Salesforce teams.

I think this is likely different in the UK vs the US. From what I've seen, Salesforce Admins/Developers will be earning around the same amount as SE's over here.

The US, as always, is an outlier on salaries, however the difference between admin and dev comp in the UK does exist. Admin salary ceiling is probably about £60K, after which you are either very senior or bring a good mix of additional skills. For devs it's about £80-90K, after which you start looking into architect positions.

I think admin salaries go higher than that once they start being process driven roles rather than pure "admin" ones, which the senior ones tend to be. ie admin progressing into consultant whereas dev progresses into architect.

> Commerce Cloud: Think enterprise grade Shopify. Competes with Oracle Commerce Cloud.

No more. Oracle laid off 90% of their commerce cloud team a few weeks ago. It’s in maintenance mode only now and will soon be dead.

The way I think about salesforce as a developer is it’s essentially a big relational database with a bunch of CRUD guis for all the objects and a built in state machine thing which can model various business processes. Then there are bells and whistles such as reports etc built on top of that and a myriad of “partners”, providers, consultants etc who will sell you prepackaged or custom solutions to make salesforce do whatever you want/need it to do for your industry or business.

In building that out it has its own somewhat idiosyncratic ecosystem of custom language(s) and technologies for creating the objects/workflows/relationships/reports etc and for doing the actual admin side, releasing new packages, doing upgrades and so on.

(2019)

Related (same site/style): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32776276

It’s the profitable arm of the Chirch of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, engineered from their world-class genealogy undertaking (and posthumous conversion - just ask the Hebrew’s about that) which serves a useful commercial function and has been able to make a dominant market position through training its evangelists and sales team in the most rigorous environment possible - door to door religious witnessing.

It’s also helped by a relatively unspoken network of people with a significant private affiliation that go out of their way to give contracts and money first and foremost to other people of that affiliation. It’s the kind of teamwork that starts young, usually defrauding the welfare system. Or not telling the local investigators why your Mom is only 13 years older than you.

Huh? As far as I know, Salesforce has no affiliation with Mormons. The founder, Marc Benioff, has never been a Mormon nor anyone in their C-suite as my few minutes of research shows.

Indeed, Benioff's not only not a Mormon, he's a well-advertised pseudo-Buddhist. Their company internal conferences begin with pseudo-Buddhist monks performing only-slightly-watered-down religious rituals, and that same group is invited to every Dreamforce (public-facing conference) every year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com