New cloud-based CMS from Salesforce - Site.com | Hacker News Reader

New cloud-based CMS from Salesforce - Site.com

site.com

18 pointsjedwhite26 comments

Interesting... on the one hand, $1500+/month seems like crazy money for a CMS to a hacker (particularly when you could, of course, build at least 90% of any given page fairly easily - though I'm not so sure about the "studio", infrastructure, etc.)

BUT - to your average BigCo (which, at least judging from the Customers page, is the target market), a few $k/month is a rounding error in the coffee budget - particularly when compared with the labor costs for a "webmaster" whose job often consists of 20% content production and 80% helping the Marketing department use Wordpress.

Most non tech focused big companies won't use Wordpress. Not only are they locked into the CMS bundles that only run on .NET but the marketing (or marcom departemnt) doesn't communicate very well with the IT department. Since the senior managers believe that front end is independent from the backend and IT re-enforces that, the big co will end up with an out of date website that is clunky for customers and users with annual requests to have a modern website like the cool tech companies. In large companies outside of tech there is very little understanding for what it takes to create and maintain a modern website.

Trust me, I saw this first hand once upon a time when a VP asked for dynamic content for products (in a database) and the IT manager told him it could not be done with JavaScript. This IT manager had over 15 years of e-commerce and website development on his linked in profile.

1500+ a month doesn't seem to outlandish, especially when compared to the cost of Wordpress Vip http://vip.wordpress.com/ which starts around 3750/m + quite a bit of additional costs.

The target market for something like this is the existing SF customer base. Specifically, the ones who use the social features built in to their software suite and need a little help setting up some sites to interface with that.

"Market at the speed of social"

Oh my god fire your copywriter this minute.

"Design and publish websites, social pages, and mobile experiences in lightning speed with the first Web CMS in the cloud. It's built for social, so you can easily add Twitter streams, Facebook likes, and more."

And his boss.

You're not their target market. Corporate marketing departments are, and they love this shit.

It's not a matter of me not being their target market;

"Market at the speed of social"

It's that their marketing copy actually, genuinely and grammatically sucks.

Seems like they picked up a few hires when the Zune marketing team disbanded...

Am I missing something? What is in this CMS that is worth $1,500/month? Or is it just they can charge that because of who they are and who they're targeting (enterprise)?

I tested out the app and found it more complicated and not much more powerful than existing free or cheap CMSes.

Deleted comment

I'm willing to bet any company that already relies on Salesforce for their sales pipeline is perfectly willing to fork that over on brand alone.

Every time I see a new hosted CMS pop up, I wince and pray that this is not the day where some genius has revealed his brilliance and I will shortly be out of a job.

Hasn't happened yet, true, but it doesn't stop me from worrying.

What the hell does "cloud-based CMS" mean?

It's the same marketing doublespeak that Salesforce is employing by their slogan "No Software". I have no idea how they can get away with claiming salesforce.com is not software. I don't even know what that means?!

(Note, I understand that they mean to say you don't need to 'install' anything, but to twist that into claiming there is 'no software' is just goofy).

that it's already prehosted

Hosted :)

If ever there was a sign it's time to short ticker CRM, this is it. The end is neigh. They have become what they set out to destroy.

The price seems out of the ballpark considering Office365 include Sharepoint and Lync/PBX.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/office365/all-plans.aspx

Sharepoint seems to have more features and probably more books, trainings, and materials.

caveat being that sharepoint is a huge pile of steaming shit. just talk to the poor souls who actually have to configure/customize it.

Those poor souls travelled around the world:

http://www.sharepointjoel.com/default.aspx

... some people don't mind doing it.

But what big systems are not big pile of dumps?

I used to work for a enterprise tech consulting firm and this would be a welcomed solution.

Software selection in enterprise is decided by 1. compatibility 2. brand 3. ease of use for stakeholders.

The enterprise market has good software, it's that the software selection/decision making process is seriously flawed.

Gotta love the Salesforce domains: http://force.com, http://database.com, http://site.com. I wonder what they paid for these...

They certainly have a lot of single word generic domains. Does anyone have a complete list of these sort of highly valued domains that Salesforce owns? It would also be interesting to know if there are any other companies that own this many highly valued domain names.

Adding on to the domains you listed, Salesforce also owns:

- http://data.com (revamped Jigsaw, an acquired company)

- http://desk.com

- http://do.com (revamped Manymoon, an acquired company)

- http://social.com (dead so not sure)

- http://chatter.com for business like Twitter/Facebook/Yammer app, but this domain isn't in the same league.

Wow, "Social" has truly just jumped the shark. And seriously, someone did not use their brain when they came up with "Furry Friends Photo Contest" for the demo site name??? What in the world were they thinking?

Anyone else having trouble signing up for the trial? The captcha won't validate for me after 15 tries. Also on each validation fail, the number of employees drop down resets.

Feels very "enterprise" for me.

"the first Web CMS in the cloud" For sure!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com