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Comment by grepLeigh | Hacker News Reader

Salesforce's biggest value proposition is the partner ecosystem, which Salesforce has cultivated for like 20+ years. Some platform companies (Shopify comes to mind) cannibalize their plugin ecosystem by adding similar functionality to the core platform, but Salesforce deliberately avoids competing with software/services in the partner ecosystem. It's such a safe bet to build on top of Salesforce, because there's basically 0 platform risk and the technology is ubiquitous.

What's your approach to plugins, add-ons, and service partners?

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I am not sure I'd agree with that - at one point Salesforce tried to buy my company, which was a best-of-the-AppExchange partner, and their justification for their (very) low offer was "that's what it would cost us to copy you". We sold the company 2 years later for 10x their offer, without a ton in the way of new revenue (our AppExchange ranking mysteriously tanked after we turned down their offer).

> AppExchange ranking mysteriously tanked after we turned down their offer

This alone would be worth a blog post (assuming you don't have any non disparagements with CRM)

This was over a decade ago, so happily not something I'm feeling too sharply nowadays. It all worked out better in the end.

We actively look for service/technology partners, so if you want to build an application or extension on top of Openkoda for you or your clients we would be more than happy.

Openkoda Core is released under MIT license, so we have no means to stop you!

Should chat with the folks at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40469773, your system could be a potential integration target.

> but Salesforce deliberately avoids competing with software/services in the partner ecosystem

It helps that Salesforce takes a huge slice from sales in the AppExchange.

This isn't entirely true, though. Salesforce does, at times, position itself against its own ecosystem. Their recent attempt at devops, no matter how feeble it is, directly competes against major players like Copado and Gearset. Mulesoft and some other ventures over the years should have theoretically relegated a huge multitude of sync apps to irrelevancy, if Salesforce had been able to execute better on them. They launched a payment system a couple of years ago that competes with some other top marketplace options. There are dozens of examples like this.

> Some platform companies (Shopify comes to mind) cannibalize their plugin ecosystem by adding similar functionality to the core platform, but Salesforce deliberately avoids competing with software/services in the partner ecosystem

When do you compete, and when do you cultivate?

Are some business sectors better at one versus the other?

Also insert the standard HN comment of “I can’t believe it’s [CURRENT_YEAR] and this functionality isn’t part of the core platform itself”

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