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> Salesforce will print money for a few more years until someone makes a less awful CRM solution and just crushes their business.

This statement undervalues the lock-in Salesforce has. One should probably make migrate-from-Salesforce tool and sell to all the new VC funded CRM shops. You could be selling shovels during a gold rush.

Yeah, aren't there already a lot of CRM products? I know Close.io is particularly useful for salespeople, but I'm not sure of any that could touch the dominance of Salesforce in the enterprise.

>Yeah, aren't there already a lot of CRM products?

Hundreds, if not thousands.

so Salesforce is like SAP but for the talkie-talkie people in a company

Absolutely. To compete with Salesforce, you need to not only do literally everything Salesforce can do, you need to be compatible with all the horrific hacked in integrations that companies have made, and do it better enough where it’s worth the complete clusterfuck that switching off Salesforce would cause.

Same as Oracle, SAP, etc.

Sounds like they really planted a deeply rooted money tree there.

There’s a formula for this it seems: get deep lock in in an area that is very boring and very essential.

Absolutely. Back when I worked for a bank as a junior analyst, we were one of the first to jump on the Salesforce train. The software was garbage but Salesforce bought the handful of us many four figure dinners. I don’t really give a fuck how annoying the software is when I’m eating a $90 steak with a glass of $200 wine.

That’s not a good way to try and compete with anyone

Tech companies have either a sales culture or an engineering culture. As a new employee, you usually figure out which your new company has by the end of the first day.

A lot of companies start with an engineering culture and transition out of it as they grow (actually, this is almost always the case) - examples: HP, Boeing, et al.

> Tech companies have either a sales culture or an engineering culture. As a new employee, you usually figure out which your new company has by the end of the first day.

Why wait until the end of your first day? This is a great question to ask in an interview.

I think the show Silicon Valley does a good job of portraying that transition.

This is my experience exactly. A few years ago, I joined a startup at 50 people that was very much an engineering culture. By the time we hit ~120 people it shifted into a sales culture due to pressure from our investors.

Sales people had complete free reign to promise everything under the sun to potential customers. It caused a lot of havoc in our product development and burned out most of the engineers pretty quickly.

Yep, Salesforce grows by acquisition and that really shows when you start implementing it, especially if you want to do anything more complex that use Marketing Cloud. Then you realise that it is a poorly integrated collection of distinct applications, each with its own data model, integration patterns and license fee model. You end up endlessly working out how to move data across applications and then back again.

I’m one of a handful of people with Salesforce experience in my company and we have a small usage of it. I’m brought into new projects thinking of using it as a counterpoint to the SF sales team, who promise the world and then disappear to be replaced by an implementation team that has to explain that things aren’t as easy, simple or cheap as the sales team promised.

> Salesforce will print money for a few more years until someone makes a less awful CRM solution and just crushes their business...so long as Salesforce can't buy that company, integrate it badly, and disillusion all the employees that made it great.

I’ve been hearing this for nearly a decade. There are VASTLY better CRMs out there. They don’t make a dent in SFCD’s business. That says a lot about the market.

The ones that are as fully featured as Salesforce suffer from the same sorts of problems.

Which, of course, should suggest you don't want some of those features, but people don't seem to want to hear that.

Approximately all CRM products suck. Salesforce is better than no CRM and not worse than its competitors. We use it, and it's tedious and awful in many ways but it does the job. YMMV of course.

This reads like someone who’s never used the platform. It is broad, allows you to do a lot quickly and relatively more easily than most other platforms.

I’m not an evangelist, but I’m now a few years into using it at the startup where I’m CTO and it’s great at what it does and there isn’t really anything else that does it.

Out of curiosity, how many non-enterprise alternatives to Salesforce have you really, genuinely evaluated?

I've personally never met anyone who has had anything nice to say about Salesforce. I've never heard anything especially bad, but I've heard so many complaints (especially from folks who have had to touch the API). From what I can see, Salesforce only has an advantage because they're the biggest, so everything and everyone works with it (in the same way that every tool that touches email integrates with Gmail).

You're sort of saying this but Salesforce has an absolutely enormous ecosystem of partners. Dreamforce is one of the largest conferences in tech. (CES is probably bigger but there aren't many.)

“There are two kinds of programming languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.”

I feel like that applies here.

The programming languages people complain about the most, are the ones I love to use. :)

I see username to post ratio doesn't really apply here.

modern php is nice.

if you had said C++ then I would've labelled you a pragmatic masochist.

I don't have any hands-on experience with Salesforce, but to me this is reminiscent of Jira. Nobody has anything nice to say about it, yet it's still the dominant player and people's go-to for project management, and no other tooling has managed to supplant it.

The people who have real problems with Jira and Salesforce aren't the ones who decide whether to use it.

The API is fine and quite flexible. There are things that are very annoying (hello deploying updates from sandboxes to the production instance), but the APIs work, are generally well documented and have lots of options to generally get what I’ve needed to get done done.

That has very much been the opposite of my coworkers' experience, which I was loosely involved with.

This is true, I did not use the platform as a user. I know it solves business problems and theyve built a big moat.

My commentary is on the company culture and focus on sales over quality. I just don’t think this is a company that knows how to organically innovate or integrate purchased innovation…and I think that makes them vulnerable to being overtaken by a competitor that solves the same business problems in a different way than they do now.

They’ll be around for decades. Just like many other formerly innovative companies hang around for a long time.