This is a good article and history is Salesforce. Another shorter developer focused perspective: Salesforce is a relational database editor. You can create tables, columns, and relationships, app in a nice UI without writing code. You get automatic views and edit forms for records in the tables. And the whole thing is built on a platform where you can write custom sandboxed code to manipulate those records, or expose…
AirTable is also a relational database editor with a nice UI. I don't know if you could compare the two though.
I'm just waiting for Salesforce to be disrupted. It has become so large and all encompassing that it is hard to get into for the lower end. Seems like a ripe area for a low end competitor but I haven't seen anything great yet.
Salesforce is amazing, in the sense that it truly lives up to its name. Everytime I've been hired into an executive role I've cancelled our Salesforce subscription and productivity has gone up.
Its clunky, slow and overly complex if you ask me. But their success cannot be denied, thus they must have an amazing salesforce.
This is a good article and history is Salesforce. Another shorter developer focused perspective: Salesforce is a relational database editor. You can create tables, columns, and relationships, app in a nice UI without writing code. You get automatic views and edit forms for records in the tables. And the whole thing is built on a platform where you can write custom sandboxed code to manipulate those records, or expose…
Sounds like it could be disrupted by focusing on a subset of the market and growing up into something without the baggage? A calcified org like that can't move fast.
That's already happening, and it's causing further fragmentation, so now companies are investing in "IPaaS" tools to merge their data. Which creates even more non-transferable knowledge. It seems customer and marketing data is a mess because marketers will invest in every shiny new tool that promises "actionable insights" from a mountain of data. As terrible as Salesforce may be, it's not as bad as Salesforce + Segment + Informatica + Looker + Lotame + etc.... But that's the world digital advertising has created. Anything for an extra click.
I'm just waiting for Salesforce to be disrupted. It has become so large and all encompassing that it is hard to get into for the lower end. Seems like a ripe area for a low end competitor but I haven't seen anything great yet.
This is a good article and history is Salesforce. Another shorter developer focused perspective: Salesforce is a relational database editor. You can create tables, columns, and relationships, app in a nice UI without writing code. You get automatic views and edit forms for records in the tables. And the whole thing is built on a platform where you can write custom sandboxed code to manipulate those records, or expose…
Pre-pandemic, Dreamforce--which is basically Salesforce's user and partner show was one of the largest trade shows in the tech industry. I think they were up to about 120,000 attendees or something like that because a huge amount of work goes into customizing Salesforce for a specific business.
On the other hand, ERPs and associated systems tend to involve a huge amount of work too.
My company had a lot of data in SAP and also a lot of data in Salesforce (don't ask me how they decided what to put where). Sometimes we need data from one or the other for projects and so far it was always that getting SAP data was extremely tedious to impossible while getting Salesforce data is usually pretty straightforward. I am not sure if that's caused by the teams that manage the systems but it's definitely very notiecable.
Salesforce is a master work of lock-in-as-a-product (LIAAP). The best part is that it’s not even a good or original product. It’s success lies in the company’s ability to sell a mega package of trivial CRM systems to non-technical sales people. It may eventually wear thin but it’s target demographic is spectacularly niche and self-consuming that there’s little need to disrupt it.
And while sales people tell other sales people they need Salesforce in order to not maintain a software stack of their own. Those same other sales people turn around and tell developers to maintain integration with the Salesforce APIs.