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What I Learned at Salesforce.com

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Re: What I Learned at Salesforce.com

#21

Post by smt88 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #13
tomblomfield wrote: post #2

"Salesforce had a truly aspirational goal: to change the way enterprise software is delivered." If that's what counts as aspirational around here, I'm in the wrong job.

If that's what counts as aspirational around here, I'm in the wrong job. Consider that one of the jobs most frequently posted on HN is for ZeroCater which seems to love the tagline that they are "help[ing] feed the world." In fact they exclusively deliver food truck meals to startups in SF & the Valley. Nothing wrong with that, but "feed the world" is beyond hyperbole. The "making the world a better place" statements…

Facebook started as an online face book for Harvard students. Now, it obviously does much more.

Personally, it keeps me up to date on the dozen or so people I really care about, but don't have the time to call/email every day. When I speak to those people, we don't have to waste time "catching up".

For others, I'm sure it has many other life-changing, world-changing benefits. Maybe it's not ending wars or feeding the poor, but it can be a great scientific resource, emotional comfort, and organizing platform.

They're also now working on delivering internet to lots of people, preventing suicide, and probably other stuff I don't know about.

So don't judge ZeroCater's endgame when they're not even close.

(All of this is coming from someone who hates frivolous Silicon Valley culture and would normally love to pile on. But in this case I really can't.)

Re: What I Learned at Salesforce.com

#22

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

wampus wrote: post #12

Is someone testing their MarketSpeak Generator? I absolutely hate dealing with vendors who use Salesforce.com. It's a red flag that support might be dismal. The only lesson to be taken from this is that you can build a business around a terrible product.

As someone in software support who had Salesforce "forced" upon us, I invite you to consider that it's as maddening for us as it is for the end-user. I've closed maybe 1500 tickets through SalesForce, and I find the system atrocious.

Among other duties, I am in charge of maintaining the Knowledge Base for our product. SF's Knowledge article capabilities, however, are abysmal. The default formatting is atrocious, barely above plaintext. SF will allow you to try to "jazz it up" by turning on HTML mode. However, due to the incredibly small character limit per article, trying to insert any more than a few paragraphs with proper HTML formatting will quickly exhaust that limit (the HTML tags themselves are counted as part of the character limit). Something as simple as creating a Table of Contents for a longer article hence becomes a nightmare in implementation.

To boot, those articles do not have static links that I can disseminate, meaning that when I'm trying to point people to a particular article, I have to tell them "Go to the Knowledge Base and search for 'X'." This is, frankly, embarrassing to put on something like a Newsletter.

Re: What I Learned at Salesforce.com

#23

Post by codeulike »

Its funny seeing Salesforce get knocked on here. I've been working with it quite a lot. They deliver two upgrades with new features every year that are deployed in minutes for each customer, and in nearly all cases, previous features and APIs and customer customisations continue to be supported. To be able to extend and extend and extend like that without breaking, their core codebase must be incredibly well engineered. They must have their internal modularity, testing, documentation and design really well figured out.

How many other live applications can you think of that have evolved continuously for over a decade without becoming an unmaintainable mess?

I work with charities and SF offer an automatic 80% discount on everything which makes them a pretty good option. Why bother custom building a CRUD-type database when you can knock it together in Salesforce using (mostly) point and click?

On the downside: too much marketing fluff (Can't google anything to do with Salesforce coding without hitting loads of marketing bollocks), really bad names/constantly changing names for features (Salesforce1 - anyone know what that is yet?), really complicated licensing if you're trying to figure out how to do X+Y with cheapest licences. And the names of the licences keep changing ....

But technically, they must be doing something very right under the hood. And while I'm at it, I like their core API, its basically an ORM.

Re: What I Learned at Salesforce.com

#24

Post by andor »

Many potential customers (and investors!) of Salesforce insisted that Benioff provide an “on-premise” version in addition to a SaaS offering.

It took the resolve of Marc, Parker, Dave, and Frank to stay true to their mission — to upend the software industry. They heard what their customers were asking for, but delivered something better. They refused to build an “on-premise” version of their product. And if they had, it would have prevented them from building a platform for SaaS applications.

Why is that? I can install also applications for the Android and iOS Platforms "on premise".

Re: What I Learned at Salesforce.com

#25

Post by brd »

tomblomfield wrote: post #2

"Salesforce had a truly aspirational goal: to change the way enterprise software is delivered." If that's what counts as aspirational around here, I'm in the wrong job.

Don't kid yourself, that is aspirational. The enterprise, for better or worse, dictates how much of the world functions. Improving the efficiency of those companies, empowering their employees, and empowering their customers is likely one of the shortest paths to world altering impact available.

One of the people I respect most in this world has worked for SAP since the bubble and the only reason he's stayed is because he has yet to "find a bigger lever".

Re: What I Learned at Salesforce.com

#26

Post by mbesto »

eitally wrote: post #14

Salesforce may have been a lean, mean sales ops tool back in 2004, but as the company has grown through acquisition and its own sales force has hugely expanded, it's platform is just not viable for many potential customers. 1) Implementation absolutely requires assistance from an integration partner. 2) Developing on top of it is an exercise in patience and futility. Their dev platform & APIs are inconsistent and hal…

You just described SAP.

Re: What I Learned at Salesforce.com

#27

Post by codeulike »

doyoulikeworms wrote: post #19
arethuza wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just about costs - it's about ease of provision, access (salespeople are out and about a lot so this is a huge deal), customizability, ease of integration etc. Salesforce were pretty courageous back in '99 basing their entire strategy around SaaS.

I'm not trying to be snarky, but you just listed a bunch of costs.

No, its a bunch of technical challenges that no-one had successfully tackled 16 years ago

Re: What I Learned at Salesforce.com

#28

Post by resu_nimda »

smt88 wrote: post #21
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's what counts as aspirational around here, I'm in the wrong job. Consider that one of the jobs most frequently posted on HN is for ZeroCater which seems to love the tagline that they are "help[ing] feed the world." In fact they exclusively deliver food truck meals to startups in SF & the Valley. Nothing wrong with that, but "feed the world" is beyond hyperbole. The "making the world a better place" statements…

Facebook started as an online face book for Harvard students. Now, it obviously does much more. Personally, it keeps me up to date on the dozen or so people I really care about, but don't have the time to call/email every day. When I speak to those people, we don't have to waste time "catching up". For others, I'm sure it has many other life-changing, world-changing benefits. Maybe it's not ending wars or feeding the…

I'm not sure how Facebook is particularly relevant to ZeroCater. What about the thousands of companies that have died before they got anywhere near their endgame? Maybe their visions and strategies were flawed, and that was reflected in ridiculous mission statements and nonsense marketing copy about "changing the world." I don't think "they technically could become a big important company one day" is a reasonable defense or excuse from judgment. And, funnily enough, I don't remember Facebook ever talking about "changing the world" in its early days.

It's hype, it's marketing bullshit, it's cliche, it's premature, and IMO it speaks to a lack of grounding and a focus on the wrong things.

Re: What I Learned at Salesforce.com

#29

Post by rconti »

aboutus wrote: post #10

All of these companies owe their very existence to Salesforce.com. Typical Salesforce propaganda. I stopped reading there.

I should have stopped reading there. Instead I just laughed to myself and continued on. Reading turned to skimming turned to skipping a paragraph or two later when it was filled with the absolute worst marketing/PR buzzword bingo straight out of .. not even Business 101, but some hack shilling a "how to make your business succeed" book.

Re: What I Learned at Salesforce.com

#30

Post by bengali3 »

eitally wrote: post #14

Salesforce may have been a lean, mean sales ops tool back in 2004, but as the company has grown through acquisition and its own sales force has hugely expanded, it's platform is just not viable for many potential customers. 1) Implementation absolutely requires assistance from an integration partner. 2) Developing on top of it is an exercise in patience and futility. Their dev platform & APIs are inconsistent and hal…

> "Implementation absolutely requires assistance from an integration partner."

> "If you aren't a multi-thousand user customer, Salesforce's sale folks don't take you seriously"

Thanks for the breakdon. I strongly agree with both above, which I think leaves plenty of opportunity for those purely focused on SMBs where companies like Hubspot have stated they will stay. Ever heard of a 'Salesforce Developer'? I put that in the same category as 'Websphere developer', 'Dynamics CRM developer' or other 'Huge Headache Engineer'. When the market needs a specialist for your tool (ie one who is familiar with the half-bakery) then how is one NOT leaving opportunity behind?

Thanks

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