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Comment by cmiles8 | Hacker News Reader

Salesforce has turned into the monolithic messy bloatware it set out to replace.

Please VCs stop with the AI FOMO and find a few good startups to just go destroy Salesforce and give folks a simple inexpensive replacement.

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There are 10,000 “simple inexpensive replacements”. Always have been. If you need a glorified three object contact list… you shouldn’t buy Salesforce.

Those just, obviously, can’t do almost any of the forty million serious things that Salesforce does, and real businesses do need.

This is an honest question: which serious things?

My boss recently added a custom integration to allow us to log hours on jobs. It includes GPS coordinates so we have proof of our whereabouts.

But that’s not a salesforce feature but rather custom software. You could bolt that onto most systems.

Sure, but it's already integrated in the Field Service app we already use.

As someone who has never used Salesforce nor hubspot. What are the core features that has people using these services? Is it just the integration between all the different areas where customer data lives?

It’s like a lot of these big SaaS platforms that lock people in to big contracts. They promise the world with all sorts of features and integrations but most customers don’t use that and get locked into buying a very expensive solution to a very simple problem (in this case tracking sales pipelines).

Where customers do use the features and integrations it’s often a giant mess that needs a whole separate ecosystem of consultants and “partners” to get the thing working and maintaining it.

> in this case tracking sales pipelines

Salesforce does a lot more than that

They're an incredible marketing machine.

But mostly it's a mix of the integration network effects you mention, cost of reimplementation if you want to leave, and the good old "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" dynamic.

Integration and reconciliation between arbitrary data sources (from SFTP+CSV files to connecting to data warehouse like snowflakes, potentially through vpn tunnels).

Data querying for creating marketing campaign audiences or generating some reporting reporting.

Little development for landing pages, forms, or custom integrations.

Multiple channels (SMS, push, email) & message templating.

And many marketing stuff like AB testing/fatigue, etc

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