> What do they even do? At the time they launched I worked for a CRM reseller. The market was roughly segmented into two sorts of solutions: contact managemen

> What do they even do? At the time they launched I worked for a CRM reseller. The market was roughly segmented into two sorts of solutions: contact management and automation for individual sales people to run on a personal computer like the extremely popular ACT!, and more enterprise style client server CRM systems like Saleslogix, Peoplesoft, Sage, Pivotal, etc. These latter products were relatively expensive and complex to implement and integrate. It was often remarked at the time that the majority of CRM implementation failed to deliver value. That matched my personal experience as well. Despite this abysmal success rate, companies kept adopting the systems because the alternative was individal sales agents keeping personal records, leading to very fragmented and inconsistent interactions with contacts and customers. The initial Salesforce offering was quite limited, but it gave everyone another upgrade path away from individual contact managers like ACT!. My coworkers and I were initially dismissive due to data ownership/confidentiality concerns. Boy were we wrong. Salesforce blew up because it solved the problems with contact managers and simpler sales force automation software, but didn't impose the costly implementation and integration efforts the enterprise client server systems did. And of course as tends to happen, now decades later the product is a massive offering that is frequently just as massive a headache to implement and integrate with.