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"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.
16 years ago when they were founded that was an aspirational goal for enterprise software and this is a CRM which a lot of organizations see as very critical to their ongoing success.
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.
"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.
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 of many startups is embarrassing. Silicon Valley parodied this trend best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXuFrtmOYKg
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 half-baked.
3) You can't just license a la carte. No matter what you think you need, you end up being quoted and convinced you need the kitchen sink instead.
4) It is prohibitively expensive compared to pure focus CRMs like SugarCRM, and doesn't have nearly the engineering polish (I can't believe I'm saying this) of things like Microsoft Dynamics.
5) If you aren't a multi-thousand user customer, Salesforce's sale folks don't take you seriously and it's hard to feel like you mean anything to them. I have never received such poor support, and this includes other companies famous for poor support (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle).
It's like they're still pretending to be a lean, mean, sexy startup when they're firmly in enterprise territory, yet they refuse to behave in ways appealing to enterprise customers. Moreover, they have spawned a whole slew of SAAS providers whose sole purpose is to interface other things into Salesforce (like 4Bridge from 4Thought, which connects Eloqua (lead generation on the web) to Salesforce. Sure, Salesforce has some huge customers -- at Dreamforce a few years ago, Cisco claimed to have something like 30,000 seats and Dell had 20,000 -- but that's not the entirety of the market. To me, Salesforce is the embodiment of the perception that many SAAS companies exist solely to support other SAAS companies, and that they bring little to no value to anyone.
All of these companies owe their very existence to Salesforce.com. Typical Salesforce propaganda. I stopped reading there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
16 years ago when they were founded that was an aspirational goal for enterprise software and this is a CRM which a lot of organizations see as very critical to their ongoing success.
I think what he means is that people should aspire to do more than lower costs for enterprise clients.
Salesforce were pretty courageous back in '99 basing their entire strategy around SaaS.
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…
That's because it's just as expensive for them to close a deal with and support your small-to-medium-sized org, but the revenue they make from you is an order of magnitude less than they'd earn from closing a Fortune 500.
This is the reason for the valley in between low-touch SaaS for small businesses (pick a monthly rate plan, pay with a credit card) and high-touch enterprise SaaS (face-to-face pitch and negotiations, sign service contracts, cut a purchase order)
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…
Make something people want.
If they require assistance, have a half-baked API, sell you the kitchen sink, are prohibitively expensive and they are printing money selling sales software they are the definition of making something people want.
> it's platform is just not viable for many potential customers
It might not be what you want, but let's not lose the forest in the trees. To build a billion dollar company you have to sell a product that is not viable for many potential customers. Not all phones are Apple and not all sales software is Salesforce.
The size of a company doesn't allow or disallow it to be lean and mean, just as both a 7' and 5' tall athlete can be lean and mean on the court.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think what he means is that people should aspire to do more than lower costs for enterprise clients.
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.
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…
> To me, Salesforce is the embodiment of the perception that many SAAS companies exist solely to support other SAAS companies, and that they bring little to no value to anyone. Make something people want. If they require assistance, have a half-baked API, sell you the kitchen sink, are prohibitively expensive and they are printing money selling sales software they are the definition of making something people want. >…
Life doesn't work in simple axioms like this. You're clearly not familiar with "enterprise software" if you think value = sales.
I'd wager that the vast majority of SalesForce users despise it. That means it's delivering less value than something that's efficient and gets out of their way. "SalesForce" is now listed as a skill on resumes, which means it is the opposite of usable!
So companies buy it, and you could argue that companies "want" it and get "value" out of it, but sometimes it's still not that rational. SalesForce has great salespeople, and it's a huge company. Sometimes just being the biggest will get you deals because it guarantees you'll be around and can offer enterprise-level support.