> It's as if the system was designed to be so complex as to require a team of people to operate, plus a manager to supervise, plus a support person to field pho

> It's as if the system was designed to be so complex as to require a team of people to operate, plus a manager to supervise, plus a support person to field phone calls This is exactly it. Even if not intentionally designed, it ends up that way. As andrewstuart2 mentioned above, "[customers] also got the full expertise of the salesforce engineering organization (which clearly is far from incompetent) being brought to bear on the problem, at no extra charge to them as a customer". This is great I guess, but if your home-grown solution doesn't use, say, Oracle, to start out with, you're going to eliminate a heck of a lot of necessary engineering expertise when things go wrong. Break up systems even more and suddenly just one generalist can do it all on the side...