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Comment by didgeoridoo | Hacker News Reader

I was at Salesforce for 4 years, and during those years the company made a massive deal about:

2020: the first AI craze, introducing “Einstein” as their name for their analytics platform, and officially changing the corporate vision to being the “No. 1 AI CRM company”.

2021: Now it’s all about “Customer 360”, i.e. account-based marketing, i.e. what basically everyone else does without such a memeable name. You wouldn’t believe the number of slide decks I had to sit through with all our little product logos orbiting this stock art character straight out of Women Laughing While Eating Salad.

2022: Never mind, now we’re betting the company on a real-time unified database called Genie, which was neither real-time nor unified (and eventually not called Genie either). Got sued for that one.

2024: AGENTS. AGENTS EVERYWHERE. WE ARE AN AGENT COMPANY NOW.

So, let’s see how this holds up in the face of the next hot thing.

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Let's not forget pre-2020 when the company released "Salesforce Blockchain", "NFT Cloud" and "Salesforce Web3 Platform".

This is how they operate. Just one marketing hype moment after another. The actual product doesn't really matter (and in a lot of cases doesn't even launch). They just need to keep making pretty slide decks filled with meaningless buzzwords so their customers get distracted from the fact that they are paying $500+ per user per month for a shitty web UI on top of 4 database tables.

That's why the Irish pronounce it "Salesfarce"

Salesmen selling to other salesmen.

I presume it works to have the new shiny thing that execs have vaguely heard about. It only has to exist while the hype cycle is at its peak.

I'm surprised there hasn't been a Salesforce AR/VR.

Not even Salesforce was deranged enough to buy into "Metaverse"?

You're just mad you didn't invent it first!

I wasn't sure whether "NFT Cloud" was real or parody so had to look it up. 2022 but it's in the official history https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/the-history-of-sales... noted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31666887

dang, I knew I shouldn't be drinking water while checking out the link. Almost caused water damage to my laptop

> Sustainable Blockchains > Choose from sustainable blockchains and estimate carbon usage prior to deployment

lol. lmao, even.

According to the numbers in that link, their nominal revenue per employee flattened out shortly after IPO up until it stops listing them in 2020.

I imagine getting that ratio up is important, especially with recent inflation.

Poe's Law being what it is, I had to double check, and Salesforce indeed has official marketing/landing pages for these.

… on top of circa 1997 Java syntax …

> so their customers get distracted from the fact that they are paying $500+ per user per month for a shitty web UI on top of 4 database tables.

Oof, I felt that cut in my bones and I was only a customer.

slow database tables too.

A minor nitpick.

SF doesn’t have tables. It is not a relational database. It is slow because it is an enterprise application.

The link details the steps that are triggered every time a record is updated.

https://www.salesforceben.com/learn-salesforce-order-of-exec...

Salesforce’s product is technically is a relational database. Maybe it doesn’t perfectly fit the relational model that Edgar Codd theorized, but I don’t think any widely used database product does.

A crucial aspect of the relational database is that the tables have columns which refer to another table (e.g. AccountId) and this what they call “lookup relationships” or “master-detail relationships” in Salesforce.

Also, I recently learned that SQL has triggers too in case you want the same procedure to take place after an INSERT, UPDATE, etc.

In Salesforce everything is an API call with hard limits eg you can only return 200 records unless you hit the bulk api.

JOINS do not exist in Salesforce. Instead you have to create bridge tables. Even then you can only traverse a max of three objects at a time.

Please do not try to use Salesforce as a general database, you are only putting yourself in a world of hurt.

I'm old enough to remember when Dreamforce was "The Largest Internet of Things Conference".

Don’t forget IOT Cloud back when IOT was a thing. I think I was one of the first 10 people holding that certification. I really liked the architecture but the product sort of went nowhere. After learning about data cloud I feel like a lot of that architecture (iirc it was called Thunder) wound up in data cloud.

I think silicon labs uses salesforce for their iot cloud. The iot cloud - globally - is gigantic, and a requirement for any embedded iot device with a radio.

I never dare say that part out loud but isn't that all we do? Move things into db tables and back. Like packing mules to go to market.

Dressed up dbs. That's what 90% of the saas economy is. I feel like I'm going mad. How can such a gigantic part of the software economy be just dressing up dbs and making them hard to interoperate? I can't make sense of it. Any business can run using email and vanilla spreadsheets. Everything else just feels like a surreal dance while I can't hear the music.

Ergonomics have value in itself, dressing up DBs in good ergonomics around some applied use-cases has quite some value for companies to not have to deal with edge cases that email + spreadsheets will suffer from at scale, that's also why I do not understand Salesforce.

The products are clunky, difficult to integrate/use/deploy, a lot of times they simply don't work or require an immense amount of effort to be barely workable. It's really hard to understand the value proposition, I guess they might have very good salespeople reaching out to the right clueless people to pitch.

This is the most accurate comment. This is how Salesforce works. That said there revenue continues to grow and they continue to pivot to the new trend in their marketing. The underlying business and most of the software they are actually selling remains the same just wrapped up in different and new marketing each year. It works well as a strategy.

But this IS the strategy. One thing after another, giving perception that SF is "leading" the way and enterprise customers continue to listen to the SF sales reps who just need to tell the story, so on and on it goes. :)

It sounds like one of those big companies that's just very well hooked up to the institutional money printers and the main challenge for them is making up narratives to justify the money that's flowing into their coffers unconditionally.

It's telling that Benioff used to work at Oracle.

Interesting. This little stunt very much reminded me of Oracle.

Yeah. I got the evil eye when I told my company Genie aka Data Cloud is nothing more than a ETL and data warehouse for the different SF clouds. The SF director at my company went on a rant on how stupid I was. It was a déjà vu moment for me. I had SF and Microsoft account reps go ballistic when I informed my bosses of my opinion of their shitty products.

https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.c360_a_data_...

This is exactly correct. This is Salesforce's 3rd or 4th rebranding of Customer Data Platform, which has never taken off. This latest positioning is targeting Snowflake.

Big orgs have plenty of people that need to justify their salaries, I mean it, I'm 100% convinced you could fire half the staff of a big organization, going heavy with the management roles and lighter on operational ones and the company would become more productive and efficient.

And the higher the people in the pyramid are the better they are at selling their ideas in their neverending quest for recognition, fat bonuses and promotions.

And once they get them, more often than not by doing pointless and even harmful work, they can then leverage it by jumping to another company.

Gervais' principle at its finest.

Twitter as an example, showed us that the staff really do matter

To be fair, they became a lot more efficient if the goal was to streamline propaganda and bot adoption

I feel like Twitter is a bit of a Rorschach test. If you want to “keep the lights on” you can get away with mass layoffs, but your revenues and product development sure do suffer.

I think you’re going to see a lot of tech companies adopt a less acute version of this strategy unfortunately

It's another form taken by enshittification to squeeze more money from the business. Employees are the largest cost center. If a business can get away with less innovation then they will get rid of and hire less staff to maintain their margin.

Realistically, this is a delicate balancing act. As others have noted, the Sales and PR game then (and always) drives the new and existing monies that come in.

I thought Twitter fired 70% of manpower and still works?

It also lost 70% of its revenue.

And 80% of its value. Musk bought it at $44B. Fidelity recently used an internal valuation of $9.4B for their own shares in the company.

he bought presidency with it so it is not that bad of an investment. it is short-sighted to look at “twitter” value since he bought it, one should look his net worth since he bought it. even if closes it down tomorrow it will be money well spent

Next-level elon defense here.

“Elon made an obvious mistake? Oh no, newb. Look on this other indicator that reinforces my bias.”

not bias but facts :) he took over twitter, made it into right-wing propaganda machine, changed algorithm during the election campaign ... it is short-sighted to not take into account that he basically bought dissemination of public information and single-handedly swayed the election. if you think he bought twitter to make money off it I have some crypto to sell to you :)

That's gotta be the most inefficient way to start a microblog at effectively elonmusk.com

The deal still has me scratching my head. They tossed out the brand name and logo. Elon already had the X name and domain. For much less than $44B I feel like you could clone Twitter and come up with a strategy to acquire users. Hell, for $1 billion you could probably pay a good number of influencers to move to your platform. $44 billion is an absolute fuckton of money to kill Twitter and move those people to your pet project.

> $44 billion is an absolute fuckton of money to kill Twitter and move those people to your pet project.

What's the point of having Fuck You Money if you can't say "Fuck You?" Your value assessment isn't taking into account the value of destroying old Twitter, of removing a major bullhorn in the information environment away from people that Musk probably considers adversaries at best, and malevolent actors at worst. Simply standing up his own competing platform would not have accomplished this.

It's weird that everyone and their mum "could" clone twitter easily. And yet the only products of note that's more than dismissive hackernews comments/slideware with something in production at similar scale was meta with threads and that's still inferior in terms of search and discoverability and scaffolded with the guts of Instagram and bluesky which has the advantage of being founded by Jack Dorsey and has been around for years now. For all the big talk musk et al have I'm not sure they could actually have built a clone. You can pay influencers but if we look at how dominant tiktok is/was making buzz and content is more of an outcome of a bunch of incentivisations and the kind of non technical community management stuff people dismiss as marketing than throwing money at all the big names you can find.

That's less an issue of a lack of manpower and more the result of one person up top pushing everyone away. A less annoying owner could lay off 70% of the staff without gutting revenue.

Though Elon Musk's purchase of the company was entirely in his own self-interest, and unfortunately, it's serving him well so far. Buying a company for a fraction of his personal wealth and leveraging that into having the president as his personal servant is one of the greatest investments in American history.

That's unrelated to the staff trim.

Unless I'm missing something, there's also been no innovation in their product at all. A company can only coast for so long.

Was there innovation in the twitter product pre-elon?

Shows that having H1Bs you can hold hostage lets you get away with anything. If it weren’t for their captive workforce they would have had far bigger problems than an unreliable service, rapidly declining user base, and imploding revenue.

Let's not forget the cheaper out-/"near"-sourced employees. Geographic arbitrage to save on the cost of staff.

Seems like an odd takeaway to me - they fired 90% of their staff and now pump out new features way more quickly than old Twitter.

What features? Only updates I ever hear is various security features getting disabled/going dead and various tech demos getting checked out/failing.

The opposite, I think. It showed us how bloated the average tech corp actual is. Musk may have went too far with his cuts, but directionally I believe he’s right.

If you can fire half of the people at a big company, you could also erase half the small startups with no impact as well.

Those startups take care of that themselves.

I would think most people would take that for granted. Small startups are often "pre-impact" (or "pre-failure", situation depending..)

The hard part is figuring out which half. And figuring out who the right people to make those decisions.

The problem is that there's no outside way to tell which 50% is the useless half. It's just like marketing budget.

As someone who was spent 5+ years in one of their many acquired companies, SFDC management has a reasonably accurate sense of their best performing staff.

However, line and middle SFDC managers are partly evaluated based on the size of their orgs. This obviously leads to perverse incentives to bloat one's org; the loss of fiefdom then leads to loss of promotion opportunity and even employment.

The AI trough of trough of disillusionment is coming, and these hype-driven execs are going to feel it. There are relatively few techs that have a genuine use-case for it (copilot being an obvious example).

Salesforce will just pivot in its marketing again. They latch on to the latest trend and drop it as soon as it isn't hot any more. They have constantly done this, it is their operating procedure.

Saleforce did not really suffer when NFTs died or blockchain become uncool because by then they had a new trend to promote.

yep salesforce has quite the track record of making bold marketing claims until the next hot thing shows up.

salesforce is a sales and marketing company first, tech company second. it's in their interest to create a ton of buzz and hype on whatever the current thing is and how they are that thing. Then they go on to sell a basic CRUD app that has to be customized by consultants.

The little github-styled Einstein was unforgettably cringe

"Einstein" references are always incredibly ironic considering how much of a socialist the guy was.

They apparently paid $20 million for the use of Einstein's image: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-27/salesforc...

TIL that the likeness of Einstein was licensed. Proceeds go to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which is fitting considering his support and investment:

"Albert Einstein is one of the founders of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. To him, the university represented a combination of the commitment to his Jewish identity and his belief in the universal values of the pursuit of truth and respect for every human being."

No paywall link: https://archive.is/2024.03.27-141124/https://www.bloomberg.c...

It’s sad they are so far off mission these days.

On the one hand, about 8% of their students are from Palestine. On the other, they’ve repeatedly retaliated against students and faculty members for protesting and making anti-genocide statements, and the university is on Boycott Divest Sanction lists.

I had no idea. That his likeness is still protected IP so long after he died really drives home just how utterly broken the current IP law is.

How is this not the top comment?

There isn't a better topic for tech CEOs to focus on, it's pathetic for the world.

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