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Comment by vba616 | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

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