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What's Salesforce? (2019)

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Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#111

Post by inthewoods »

mym1990 wrote: post #106
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…

The way I think about it is that Lead is a stage of a Contact, not a separate object.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#112

Post by eloisant »

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…

Honestly most businesses think they need a lot of customization because they think they're oh-so-special, but in fact something like 1) would work great for them. I know, I've worked in consulting and built software for companies who would have been better off with an off-the-shelf solution.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#113

Post by dzhiurgis »

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…

I’ll sprinkle that Salesforce employees have a huge pledge not to break your software as they update it 3 times a year.

On flip side, meticulous saving of cpu and memory means your solutions are super constrained. You need to do all sort of tricks like 90s game programmer and still can run yourself into corner on larger systems. Back end is supremely unevolved - their serverless functions have been in beta forever and apex is like 20 years old Java.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#114

Post by dzhiurgis »

echelon wrote: post #4
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…

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.

I was pretty sure Firebase was in a position to kill Salesforce’s platform, but I guess they never sold it as business platform (plus Google wood never be able to execute human Sales and Support at Salesforce scale)

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#116

Post by rsj_hn »

rvanmil wrote: post #101
rsj_hn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem is that the definition of "just for your needs" lasts about a year, max, and then your needs change. Businesses are constantly re-organizing and engaging in process engineering, and this creates rapidly changing needs. Go through this a few times and at some point you will get the bright idea that you need to create some DSL/platform metaframework to allow customers to auto-configure what "just for your needs" means or else you will be buried in a pile of feature requests that your tool doesn't have but the competitor does. And then third parties will come along and you'll want to package their work to create pluggable tools that customers can install. Then you'll spin up app store.

Then throw in all the regulatory and compliance stuff that businesses need to trust storing their data with you. Add EU regulations and you will end up building data centers in different parts of the world. Then you will want to spin up training to use your custom DSP. And localization packs. Then you will need APIs to pull data in and out as customers will fear lock-in and they'll want you to integrate nicely with some other service. Then you have to figure out how those APIs work with your metalanguage. Then other customers will demand the ability to reskin everything with their corporate logos, custom login screens, support for SMS and two factor auth, support for third party identity providers, scripts to enroll/unenroll users, admins will want scripting platforms to manage all the complexity created by adding the other features, Etc.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#118

Post by wnevets »

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…

But it's enterprise software and real companies use enterprise software, so if we use it we'll also be a real company!

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#119

Post by Lornedon »

I'm a pretty new Salesforce admin, and so far it has been a horrible experience. Apart from its horribly sluggish user experience, developing for it as also very frustrating.

You can't restore backups! You can export your data, but there's no way to import it, because you can't set the object Id or autonumbered fields (like the case number, which gets communicated to the customer). They used to provide an extremely expensive recovery service, but they stopped doing that. That's just unbelievable for a business product.

I also can't count how many times I looked up an issue and found an "Ideas" post that's over ten years old, with 10k upvotes and no reaction from Salesforce at all. Id doesn't seem like they work on the core product anymore, they just release new things that you need a license for.

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