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What's Salesforce? (2019)

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Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#101

Post by rvanmil »

rsj_hn wrote: post #76
rvanmil wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Rea…

I agree, it’s their business priorities which result in engineering that leads to bad software. What I’m saying is you can choose to not buy into one of those uber-programmable enterprise platforms and instead (let someone) build fast and user friendly specific software just for your needs. All of the customization and dynamic crap can go out of the window that way, which will allow engineers to make things fast and user friendly again.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#102

Post by altacc »

tinyhouse wrote: post #26

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…

Salesforce do tend to buy a company and then brand that company's products as part of Salesforce. The result is a mess. Want the same data in your marketing cloud than your core? Nope, it's a different database and data model and true syncing of data can be a nightmare. What you're left with is the same as if you'd bought products from 5 different companies and built an integration layer to tie them together. Funnily enough, Salesforce has had to build an data integration platform to help untangle its mess of acquisitions and of course the customer has to pay extra to use it.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#103

Post by aik »

rsj_hn wrote: post #51
vbsteven wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Love this comment. My company is rebuilding our EHR software right now to make it more customizable among other things. Know any good resources on making the right architectural and product decisions to protect against or prevent this eventual fate?

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#104

Post by lobotryas »

aik wrote: post #103
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…

Love this comment. My company is rebuilding our EHR software right now to make it more customizable among other things. Know any good resources on making the right architectural and product decisions to protect against or prevent this eventual fate?

Yes. Hire an architect with a proven track record and significant experience and give them the responsibility. Reading a few medium articles or an O’Reily book won’t be a substitute.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#105

Post by rsj_hn »

aik wrote: post #103
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…

Love this comment. My company is rebuilding our EHR software right now to make it more customizable among other things. Know any good resources on making the right architectural and product decisions to protect against or prevent this eventual fate?

My general advice is not so much about the software as controlling your corporate appetite for customization. There is just an incredible cost to bespoke customization, while the use cases of it are often things like executives' vanity at getting live dashboards or something else. You can have an in-house team build some forms atop a database, and you can even make that work, but only if you rigidly fight feature creep. If you can't fight the feature creep, might as well go with one of the big solutions so that features are reflected in bottom line costs and have to explicitly be paid for out of your business budget, rather than implemented by making requests of your in-house dev team.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#106

Post by mym1990 »

inthewoods wrote: post #89

I've used Salesforce at every company I've worked at for the last 8 years. Here are my observations: - There is a special place in hell for the person who made the decision to have leads and contacts as separate objects. It creates all kinds of complexity. Some may have a need to work with leads but for clean reporting, you almost have to dump leads. Most B2B companies I know don't use the lead object and autoconvert…

Whether Salesforce intended it or not, the platform has moved far beyond just Sales. In the multitude of cloud products currently available, almost all of them use the Contact object as something other than a lead. So I guess from my point of view, a Lead can always be a Contact that is captured/not, but a Contact may not necessarily be a "lead", in the traditional sense of word anyways.

Given that Salesforce is the only CRM I know in my fairly young career, I can definitely see many of its shortcomings and do not envy the engineers/product managers that have to address those.

I think if someone is starting a company, Salesforce is not the right option, both because it is extremely expensive, and its not exactly plug and play if you're looking for customizations.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#108

Post by dzhiurgis »

adzm wrote: post #2

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…

URL’s is probably one thing that Salesforce solved well, at least in classic - you’re always routed to the right page by 15 character ID.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#109

Post by mym1990 »

I have been working on the Salesforce platform for about 3 years now, and it has been a pretty enlightening experience(good and bad). It has certainly been lucrative as well. I would say that a lot of the issues around Salesforce stem from how easy it is to write or configure a terrible solution. Something that looks like it works but is so far from any sort of optimization.

Much of Salesforce implementation development also goes unvetted by the client. I have worked and currently work on projects where I constantly ask 'how did this ever make it into production...and how has no one noticed that this is hot garbage for 4 years'. Eventually someone digs deep enough and whoever is managing that project at the time gets the brunt of the blame unfortunately...

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#110

Post by IneffablePigeon »

throwitaway1235 wrote: post #61

"Salesforce’s point-and-click database editor and drag-and-drop UI builder alone make it much more than a CRM. But when you bolt on other apps and 3rd-party APIs, it gets close to programming without code: a new way to build software." Seems analogous to Wordpress for building websites, without actually knowing how to build websites, yes/no?

Absolutely, it's not a perfect analogy but it's a surprisingly good one.

The value is in the sheer size of the ecosystem and the idea of everything being plug and play, even if the reality often necessitates actual code when you get past the happy demo path to your business's weird edge cases.

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