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What's Salesforce? (2019)

retool.com

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Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#71

Post by acidburnNSA »

delusional wrote: post #66
stevebmark wrote: post #3

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…

So it's Django?

To use Django like this you need'd at least a handful of Django devs writing the models, frontend views, and api views as code.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#73

Post by tinyhouse »

tinyhouse wrote: post #64
slap_shot wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

@jjeaff Of course they do development. They have software engineers and buy real software companies with software engineers. Someone needs to maintain all the software they keep integrating into their eco-system (some products which they acquire remain independent). But their business model is to expand by buying or investing in other companies. They don't invest in building new stuff in house. Partly because they don't really have the capabilities to build something like Slack for example that would dominate the market.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#74

Post by throwawaysea »

Retool also had a great post in the past demystifying what SAP is: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/

It’s amazing content in an otherwise opaque category of enterprise software and services, which are so strongly embedded in part because no one knows what they do and how they’re used in practice.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#76

Post by rsj_hn »

rvanmil wrote: post #63
rsj_hn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Choose 3 and then watch the consultants build the custom software using a low/no code platform. Now you are still in the slow and poor user experience and no customization options and more expensive and worse support ;-) 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 i…

All companies in this space start out fast and user friendly, but to gain additional customers in this space they need to add more features. See my first item. Then they either fail or end up an uber-platform. Again, this has nothing to do with your company, it is just the nature of the market, and it's funny when someone gets an idea to start a "lean", "fast" product as if no one else had thought of that before.

Really if you think you can do better than X, whether X is oracle forms or SAP or whatnot, it's important to understand where X went wrong. Hint: it's very rarely because they were "old-fashioned" or didn't realize that customers liked fast software that was easy to use. The founders of X were just as smart/capable as you are, but they faced a market challenge and made some choices with trade offs. If you limit your analysis to "they didn't know software should be fast", then you are not going to end up any better than they are once you reach their scale. I am not trying to say that every incumbent always made the right choices. But an understanding of where they went wrong needs to go beyond "they went wrong because they are old fashioned" or "they went wrong because they didn't realize software shouldn't be filled with bugs". There are real hard problems here that need to be understood before you are in a position to improve on what the incumbents are doing.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#77

Post by lumost »

mrlatinos wrote: post #15
echelon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 + Segme…

Each extra tool provides a date for a date when marketing will be useful. As a pm I was told that we couldn’t advertise because our marketing integration wasn’t done.

A CMO can go from shop to shop delivering nothing but broken ad tech integrations with the job of fixing the mess from the last person.

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