Microsoft Is Said to Evaluate Possible Bid for Salesforce.com
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
> Salesforce jumped 5.9 percent to $75.82 as of 3:01 p.m. in New York trading.
This article, and the subsequent stock price hike are all the result of an anonymous tip. How can I become one of these anonymous "people with knowledge on the matter"?
A malicious actor could make a killing submitting false tips on buyouts and taking advantage of the following stock price hike.
There's nothing in the article to suggest the tipster is completely anonymous, and though Bloomberg is never 100% correct, I would expect them to vet their sources. The reporter could merely be protecting their source.
I was wondering at the time if someone with stock had known about the pending bankruptcy, and started the rumor so they could cash out.
1) If they are making it up themselves, they can be sued.
2) If they are frequently wrong, day traders shouldn't listen. (And it's day traders, not long term investors who pay the price when they're wrong)
> 1) If they are making it up themselves, they can be sued.
Sued by who, and with what evidence for wrongdoing? I don't see that being likely.
http://finance.yahoo.com/video/salesforce-trading-resumes-vo...
What I'd like to know is how I can get a job where writing the tautology "The […] company’s options could include rebuffing any buyer, or working out a sale" passes as insight.
Don't know what percentage of people who try it are successful and what percentage of those get away with it, I just know charges have been filed in the past.
Anyway there's more profit to be made from other people's delusions. (EG: I knew in 2001 there would be a housing bubble and made money between then and 2007 from the bubble. I called the end of the bubble a year early but close enough.)
I could tell you such a delusion right now but you wouldn't believe it... the best, most profitable delusions are widely held, until they aren't. In 2007 everyone thought house prices always rose. I can't tell you how many times I got downvoted on hacker news for claiming there was a housing bubble.
Be a C-level executive at Microsoft who feeds tips to a reporter or banker? Corporate espionage is a real thing, and every major investment firm engages in it. How else can you explain things like the market's ability to perfectly predict earnings results hours before they are released?
After working at high levels of big companies in corporate America, I learned that there are no secrets at any company. Executives will speak privately and candidly to each other about their company's plans; while their companies may be competitors, it benefits both of them personally to have advance knowledge of the plans of the other company (and they may work together at some point in the future). There are a great many things that nobody will confirm publicly, but any major effort at any large US company has been tipped to financial analysts or the press long before its announcement.
Captive audience (Salesforce customers).
Microsoft, IMO, gets business needs at a pretty hard wired and basic level, unlike Google or Apple. Their core audience and financials is B2B - consumers are, IMO, a sideshow, and likely have been since the early '90s.
I'm not a huge MS fan, but I am pretty sure that I feel much more comfortable using MS services for my company as opposed to Google, whose customer service is legendary.
I'm not sure they get business needs any better than Google and Apple, but they are very well-tuned to how to appeal to enterprise CTOs -- which I think is often more about appealing to business conventional wisdom than needs, per se -- on top of having the advantage for those buyers of being what IBM was a few decades earlier ("Nobody ever got fired for buying...")
Microsoft's ultimate goal is for every new business to buy a Microsoft subscription which includes Windows, Office, Sharepoint Online, Exchange Online, and now maybe a Salesforce product.
It is a one stop shop for all of a business's technology needs. All they need in addition to it is the physical hardware and they're good to go. Right now a lot of businesses only run on Windows+Office+online services+an accountant package. Now they won't even need the accountant package.
Acquiring Salesforce would enable Microsoft to dominate this sector (approach 50% market share potentially). Salesforce has done a great job of fostering an ecosystem of apps that rely on their data platform.
Microsoft can add value to the existing SalesForce product by replacing their cloud infrastructure. While pioneering this concept in the enterprise SalesForce's infrastructure is outdated and aging. Plugging the existing customer base and app ecosystem into Azure (or Microsoft's cloud at large) could be a huge win for both companies.
Net-net this makes a ton of sense in theory, but big mergers destroy value more often than not as they are extremely challenging to execute effectively (it's basically a multi-billion dollar corporate refactoring exercise).
This says nothing about their capabilities, they are all feature rich. And conservatism in ERP and CRM business is valued by enterprise customers.
If this rumor is true I'm guessing MSFT sees the opportunity for some serious cost synergies/reductions. At a $46B market cap that would seem to be a lot though!
About 50% of their revenue still goes to marketing expenditures. Another big dent in their earnings potential, of course, are the stock options they hand out (which is why Salesforce likes to talk about non-GAAP) - something like $500m to $600m per year now, equivalent to roughly 10% of sales.
http://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-earnings-q1-2014-5
If its ORacle, the company that already has 3 poorly intehrated CRMs now has 4. If its MS, then 2. None have perfectly complimentary cultures (although SFDC and ORacle are close-ish) and the monolithic creatures borne of that M&A will just collapse under its own weight.
SFDC uses a Java like DSL, APex, which is lock in, whose life under either merger would be curious to see.
Curious to hear people's thoughts on it - particularly on their Service Cloud product? What are the issues people are having?
Also, can you extend it easily, or code plugins (or whatever they are) for it easily?
(If I have to deal with it, keen to hear what I may be in for).
http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#tech...
Can anyone explain why it is so bad?
It's like a webapp from the 90s, every action triggers a complete page reload; complete with an occasionally buggy UI, limited searchability, restrictive UI, and occasionally misrouted tickets that were impossible to find. But mostly, it was just really slow.
I've talked to a few other folks who had similar experiences at other companies. In every case, I got the impression that using Salesforce was a mandate made by management without consulting the folks who'd actually have to use it every day.
Maybe it's a bit better on the CRM side, or if your company pays the extra money for Desk.com... but I really wouldn't recommend using Salesforce for handling support tickets.
How is that any different from other programming interfaces?
Do you also not like dynamic typing because it gives you more flexibility?
I don't like dynamic typing for other, myriad reasons :)
So does Apple, but probably for their Watch integration or improving internal CRM.
All major tech consulting firms are employing SF as a backend. It is perceived as an extremely secure product.
Disclaimer: I work there
The documentation is dense and somewhat difficult to follow - I ended up spending a lot of time reading forum posts to get a grip on how to use it. The API at the time was also SOAP/XML, with all the fun joy that comes with using that (although, in fairness, it looks like they now have a REST/JSON API too).
The API limits are also draconian, resulting in all kinds of code nastiness to stay within the usage limits. In our case, because of how things are stored in Salesforce and how the API is constructed, it might take 5+ API calls to update various parts of a single Account. We ended up batching changes and sending them every hour or so, and just had to tell our sales folks that info in Salesforce may be delayed up to an hour.
Not to mention, from a UX perspective, it feels like the 00s never ended.
We later ended up switching to Zurmo with a very heavy amount of customization. It ended up making more business sense to bring it in house and pay someone to customize it for exactly what we needed than to sign another Salesforce contract.
The average wordpress theme will have over 10,000 lines of html, php, javascript, css in it.
Wordpress itself has continued to massively expand for no apparent reason. 10,000 lines of code in 2003; 20,000 in 2004; 30,000 in 2005; 40,000 in 2006; 60,000 in 2007; 90,000 in 2008; 120,000 in 2009; 140,000 in 2010; 150,000 in 2011; 160,000 in 2012; 230,000 in 2013; 300,000 in 2014.
It's like the Spruce Goose of cms. Yeah it'll fly, but it's ridiculous.
Salesforce would fit to Microsoft's product portfolio. They have Microsoft Dynamics CRM but Salesforce offers more features. Then the have Microsoft Dynamics ERP which consists of 5 different ERP products that Microsoft bought: Microsoft Dynamics AX (formerly Axapta), Microsoft Dynamics GP (formerly Great Plains Software), Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formerly Navision), Microsoft Dynamics SL (formerly Solomon IV), Microsoft Dynamics C5 (formerly Concorde C5). Salesforce would theoretically be renamed to Dynamics CRM SF.
These are basics you'd expect any CRM software to handle well, but it's also surprisingly bad at things you'd expect a darling of the enterprise world to do well at (representation of structure of corporate groups, representation of client decision making hierarchies, representation of individuals' roles at multiple clients, ability to find companies by geography etc.) And needless to say, the corporate versions that have been hacked to fit specific needs add all manner of monstrous new forms to fill in and weird bugs with price calculation.
If there's one thing that sums the service up it's this: if you're locked out of Salesforce[1] the screen which advises you of this provides an email address for their help team... which turns out to be autoresponder advising you that the mailbox is not being monitored so please log into Salesforce to lodge the response.
Like Drupal it's overgrown with weeds. You need to keep pruning to keep moving, or you'll be a victim of backwards compatibility. Just ask Microsoft about that, or those trying to clean up OpenSSL.
There are other systems that are far worse, but they're not as popular so they're irrelevant. Nobody cares about Movable Type any more, for example.
It would be less of an issue if you could swap out parts of it, but you can't.
The only languages I would consider for an enterprise system in the most loved technologies would be C# and Python. The rest look good for startups, open source or hobby projects. When you build systems for the enterprise that need to be robust and live for years on end. It's hard to justify taking a risk with a newer language for which there is less expertise and less libraries.
http://meta.salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/1946/is-s...
It looks like research did not have representative population.
And do many people actually use Heroku for anything serious? Once they hit a certain size it seems Heroku quickly becomes uneconomic.
Heroku had its time in the sun but rapidly that day is coming to an end...