61–70 of 206 posts
Seems analogous to Wordpress for building websites, without actually knowing how to build websites, yes/no?
Salesforce just has a weird flow. I think I have the gist of it, but man do you have to use it for quite a while before it starts to make sense - all while you wait and wait and wait for anything to happen after you submit something. Ugh.
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Had similar experiences with Netsuite and to a lesser extent Jira. So many layers of configuration options and hooks make everything super extensible, but it comes at a a cost and that cost is usually performance.
Yup, the "enterprise" software space is generally incredibly expensive and buggy and a poor user experience, and there is nothing anyone has ever been able to do about it, as firms want custom code just for them, and so the development/maintenance cost can't be leveraged over millions of customers all getting the same software like the B2C space. So given that the market is 3 orders of magnitude smaller, you have a c…
I think it’s pretty sad that enterprise software is mostly stuck the way you describe. There are companies willing to invest in fast and user friendly custom software though; the company I work for is pretty successful at doing just that.
Nothing against Salesforce but please don't call it a software company. They are not a software company but rather an investor. They invest and acquire other companies. The majority of their revenues still come from their investments rather than their products. To their credit they have been doing some great investments over the years, but they have no capabilities of building anything themselves. Now, I know all tec…
Why can't they be both? They literally are a software company. And yes, they acquire other software companies. Plenty of companies in other industries (e.g. consumer goods) are conglomerates, often a result of acquisitions - it doesn't make them pure "investors."
Update: I see my original comment is getting downvoted. I knew I'm going to upset some sensitive Salesforce employees here :)
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Yuck. Hubspot is the "CRM" all my sales people hate (they currently like Pipe...something). also, "advice" from a new, shill, throwaway account? pass.
Well I was specifically responding to someone who couldn't find a salesforce replacement because they all wanted to manage the back office. So it seemed relevant rather than shilling in my eyes. Sorry to hear your team dislikes Hubspot.
> "...they currently like Pipe...something"
probably pipedrive. it's pretty good for small sales (and some marketing) groups to manage their pipelines. easy to get up and running and fairly flexible for what it is. it's not going to replace salesforce though.
hubspot is a mid-market marketing automation product, sitting between little pipedrive and huge salesforce. it's also pretty decent for what it is, helping medium-size marketing (and some sales) departments coordinate across various channels. it also won't replace salesforce, but is appropriate for a mid-tier company (maybe ~$20-200MM in revenue).
salesforce is a huge sales channel management platform with at least a couple marketing automation products bolted onto it, along with all sorts of other semi-related stuff, like SCM (supply chain mgmt). this is because they want to own the totality of "marketing", which encompasses all of product, price, promotion, and distribution.
(i've done some consulting in this area and have helped clients pick and set up these things)
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…
I understand the appeal of Salesforce, though in my experience it is just as clunky and slow as the software it replaced. I'm sure there are configurations that are not that way, but it's a horrible part of my day to day experience using it as a customer support module. Comments take 4 seconds to add. Opening a case in a new tab is 30 seconds or more. Comments and feeds load progressively, slowly, making it nearly im…
Cannot wait to see “What’s Adobe?” =)
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.
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Why can't they be both? They literally are a software company. And yes, they acquire other software companies. Plenty of companies in other industries (e.g. consumer goods) are conglomerates, often a result of acquisitions - it doesn't make them pure "investors."
I don't argue they are qualified to be called a software company. They make money from software after all (at least partly). But they are not a software company in the sense that they don't build technology. Their specialty is buying and selling software and investing in software companies (check one of their 10-K filings). For me personally they are not a software company since building software is not their core bu…