41 ms·

What's Salesforce? (2019)

290 points by eddywebs 5y ago

adzm 5y ago
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 impossible to get to the beginning of long discussions. URLs are long and crazy and have no useful info or anything cool in them. We've had Salesforce consultants and experts come in and gain a second or two here or there but it's been an awful experience over the last 5 years.
- vbsteven 5y ago
  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.
  - jonplackett 5y ago
    Netsuite is stuck 30 years ago at least. So painful and insanely slow. It’s like having dial up again.
    - mrwnmonm 5y ago
      Which ERP isn't?
      - jonplackett 5y ago
        Maybe none? I think Netsuite is particularly slow though. Luckily I only have to use it for timesheets but even for that it should have its own job number for the time wasted waiting for it to load.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    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 choice of adding 2 orders of magntitude to the cost, and decreasing quality by 1 order of magnitude, or some other combination of this. That leaves you with a few options: 1. Don't allow businesses to customize at all, make them fit to you. That can work with something like ADP, but little else. A lot of the cool B2B startups think they can displace incumbents by just building cool, fast software, and then they are perplexed why they can't gain marketshare when every other customer has some bespoke use case they don't support. 2. Build a general uber-programmable platform that businesses can customize themselves -- now you are in the "slow", "poor user experience" territory but at least it works and is cheaper than option 3 3. Hire consultants to write bespoke products from scratch for each business. That's the old IBM Services model. So if your baseline is Microsoft Office, then the performance/user experience of your favorite online B2B platform is going to be terrible. But if your baseline is IBM Services, then it's a godsend.
    - rvanmil 5y ago
      Choose 3 and then watch the consultants build the custom software using a low/no code platform. Now you are still in the slow and poor user experience and no customization options and more expensive and worse support ;-) I think it’s pretty sad that enterprise software is mostly stuck the way you describe. There are companies willing to invest in fast and user friendly custom software though; the company I work for is pretty successful at doing just that.
      - rsj_hn 5y ago
        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. Really if you think you can do better than X, whether X is oracle forms or SAP or whatnot, it's important to understand where X went wrong. Hint: it's very rarely because they were "old-fashioned" or didn't realize that customers liked fast software that was easy to use. The founders of X were just as smart/capable as you are, but they faced a market challenge and made some choices with trade offs. If you limit your analysis to "they didn't know software should be fast", then you are not going to end up any better than they are once you reach their scale. I am not trying to say that every incumbent always made the right choices. But an understanding of where they went wrong needs to go beyond "they went wrong because they are old fashioned" or "they went wrong because they didn't realize software shouldn't be filled with bugs". There are real hard problems here that need to be understood before you are in a position to improve on what the incumbents are doing.
  - tootie 5y ago
    Once an enterprise reaches a certain level of scale that amount of complexity is almost unavoidable. Tools like Salesforce and JIRA are great for providing the needed flexibility within guard rails and a shared vernacular.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    I am going through this right now in a project. A lot of configurations break the database model and can't be really modeled by the database so you end up doing a lot in code which is way slower. Seems we need a type of database that can support these super-flexible customizable data models better. Maybe something where the data model and stored procedures written in a language like C#, Java or JS are understood by the database and optimized.
- NineStarPoint 5y ago
  Yeah, I’m definitely not convinced there are configurations of salesforce that aren’t terrible. Other products that are often configured terribly I’ve generally seen an example or two of one that actually was better, but I’ve never seen a salesforce that wasn’t slow as molasses.
- t0mas88 5y ago
  It's slow and the UI is stuck in 1999 unless you pay extra for what they sell as the more modern UI, which takes you from 20+ years behind to only like 5 years outdated.
  - iratewizard 5y ago
    Lighting is free. The only time you have to pay more is to get custom pieces of your system built in classic rebuilt. In what ways are lightning's UI "5 years outdated?"
- dylan604 5y ago
  Is it heavy JS load on the client side, or slow processing on server side that causes this sluggishness?
  - bigfudge 5y ago
    I think it’s probably both. The api and db querying are dog slow too.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      Let's hope it's not something laughably simple as adding indexes to their tables! I mean, that's like something I'd forget and I don't even play a DBA on TV
  - iratewizard 5y ago
    The typical JS heap is above 90MB out of the box. Locker service is the main culprit for that, and Locker Service does cause some slowdown. Server-side, they are multitenant and the tenants you are sharing compute with are frequently running massive data operations on a regular basis. Those tenants have no incentive to get things running faster because they don't pay for compute hours. As long as the operations run within Salesforce's governor limits, who cares? Salesforce's response to the client-side half of the problem is migrating from Aura to Lightning Web Components. LWC is statically analyzable and Aura is not, so they can get some optimizations in that way. On the flip-side, LWC is a piss-poor framework because of how they've stunted it for optimization's sake. Half of the beauty of Salesforce as a developer is the fact that I can build in a month what would typically take a standard web dev team a year to piece together. That's only true so long as my team works in Aura with all of the scaffolding tools and libraries we've built over the years.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  URL’s is probably one thing that Salesforce solved well, at least in classic - you’re always routed to the right page by 15 character ID.
- wnevets 5y ago
  But it's enterprise software and real companies use enterprise software, so if we use it we'll also be a real company!
- kradroy 5y ago
  You're not the intended user of Salesforce. The UIs and flows you use are mostly data entry funnels for the true user: management and executives. You didn't pay for the software; they did. "End-user" satisfaction is low on the product feature list. Every time your client slows down, somewhere an executive was promoted.
  - orangesquirrel 5y ago
    I made a similar observation while working at a Fortune 500 company that used Salesforce. Decisions about the company's Salesforce implementation were clearly made by people who didn't care too much about data entry UX. The problem was that they did care greatly about data entry -- and data entry, at least in part due to being needlessly cumbersome, tended to fall far short of expectations.
  - 40four 5y ago
    I’m not sure I understand your point? My understanding is the intended users of Salesforce are most certainly the sales team. And I say this out of experience with using it as part of a sales team at a car dealership I worked at years ago. Every sales person in the company was expected to log all the customers they interacted with, track phone numbers & other info, set reminders to makes sales calls, make notes of what you talked about in said sales calls, et cetera, et cetera. And management was adamant that we did these things. And for good reason. Sales is a very data driven industry, so to your point yes, it’s great for upper management to be able to track & aggregate all of the data company wide. It’s been too long since I used it for me to really remember or comment on the performance of the software. But if it’s as bad as the OP is saying that’s a real problem. If you have a whole sales team using this, and performance issues are constantly slowing them down and wasting time, that’s something that should seriously be addressed. I guess you’re saying though that they just don’t care if the sales team experience sucks? As long as management gets their data?
    - e3bc54b2 5y ago
      > intended users of Salesforce are most certainly the sales team. Alas, intended users are seldom the ones writing checks. As the old saying goes, decision to go with Oracle happens on golf course, not meeting room.
- Yabood 5y ago
  Couldn't agree more! I'd like to add to that the terrible UX. In fact, Salesforce is so terrible that there are dozens of businesses built around just configuring it for you.
stevebmark 5y ago
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 them over APIs to external systems. The platform is both powerful and pretty clunky. Salesforce development is consistently 20 years behind established best practices. Learning Salesforce means learning the thousands of limitations and broken parts of the ecosystem. And it’s non transferable knowledge.
- echelon 5y ago
  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.
  - spamalot159 5y ago
    You're right and I think people have tried but nobody has made a killer product yet. Everyone is either trying to copy Salesforce or too niche.
    - leeoniya 5y ago
      in my experience, every vendor we looked at who competes with salesforce is not interested in your business unless they are allowed to take over your entire backoffice. for example, we only wanted it for the CRM and order ingestion via manual entry & API, and that was okay, while other vendors insisted on also taking over our inventory management, invoicing, fulfillment, etc, rather than allowing us to simply integrate with the minimal set of APIs which we needed to sync our systems with theirs.
      - hubspotthrow 5y ago
        Give Hubspot a gander. We want to handle your entire front office. But we're also perfectly content just handling customer data and gdpr requests for you.
spamalot159 5y ago
I'm just waiting for Salesforce to be disrupted. It has become so large and all encompassing that it is hard to get into for the lower end. Seems like a ripe area for a low end competitor but I haven't seen anything great yet.
- Phurist 5y ago
  Does Pipedrive work ?
- joezydeco 5y ago
  That's what Excel is for. I'm only half joking.
- ryanSrich 5y ago
  That’s a tall hill to climb. Not because it’s hard to make a better product, many already exist. But because it’s engrained into the DNA that makes up an enterprise. At some point you just buy Salesforce. Not because you need it, or even because you want it. It just manifests itself. You don’t get fired for buying Salesforce.
- howmayiannoyyou 5y ago
  Having evaluated dozens of CRMs to replace my company's internally built system, here's my five cents: - Salesforce is slow, expensive after adding add-ons, costly to customize, and visually unappealing. The older and less tech-friendly workers I've surveyed found it painful to use. The same might be said of many Salesforce competitors, including MSFT Dynamics and Netsuite. SugarCRM also has many of the same failings, but its UI/UX is better IMHO. - Close.io, Pipedrive, Salesloft, Nethunt, Nutshell, Nimble and few others have a simpler and more engaging take on CRM that seems to be easier for a wider variety of users to adopt. - A big chunk of CRM's perceived value is better found through sales training that focuses on qualifying customers and good work habits. - CRM cannot turn most under or non-performing salespeople into performers. - Many performing workers will resist adding contacts and data to a CRM for several reasons, self-preservation instinct being most prominent. - Nurture marketing, once a CRM innovation, has become an annoyance for client/customer prospects... particularly over email. - Predictive CRM requires either a lot of data to train, or hard to obtain signals. The concept underachieves. The next great thing may very well be inversion of CRM, whereby your customers/clients automate the acquisition, evaluation, negotiation and purchase of products or services. At the enterprise level this exists for commodity products & services, but it's largely non-existent at the SMB/SOHO level. The normalization and quantification problem is significant, but I'm confident ML will address some of these challenges in due time. Tl;dr ... there's still no substitute for hiring the right people. Charisma, emotional intelligence & motivation always surpasses sales automation.
azure10 5y ago
Company is moving away from salesforce and I don’t regret it
- kamyarg 5y ago
  Can you share the reasoning? How was the "cost" of migration justified vs. <insert problems with Salesforce>?
te_chris 5y ago
Salesforce is a full business app development platform with almost unmatched flexibility, fully hosted and programmable. CRM doesn’t really begin to cover it. This reads like I’m a zealot. I’m not. But there is nothing that I’ve seen that can do what it can do and, if you know how it works, you can leverage it for incredible time and efficiency savings for developing and deploying business apps.
- chasd00 5y ago
  This is true, if you really know what you’re doing you can make salesforce sing. If you actually understand its breadth and depth Salesforce is a pretty amazing platform.
- louisvgchi 5y ago
  Similar things said of Drupal.
deleted 5y ago
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lbj 5y ago
Salesforce is amazing, in the sense that it truly lives up to its name. Everytime I've been hired into an executive role I've cancelled our Salesforce subscription and productivity has gone up. Its clunky, slow and overly complex if you ask me. But their success cannot be denied, thus they must have an amazing salesforce.
- howmayiannoyyou 5y ago
  "Everytime I've been hired into an executive role I've cancelled our Salesforce subscription and productivity has gone up." ... Great observation. But what did you replace it with?
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    I did something similar at a smaller scale migrating away from Oracle to the Excel spreadsheets in SharePoint that fed everything anyway. Lol
    - texasbigdata 5y ago
      I heard moving into a new home and then immediately burning it down to camp in the back yard is great for the maximizing your Daily Steps KPI also. This conversation of "what I did":"what the outcome was":"what the goal was":"what the organization needs to win" seems a bit imprecise.
      - Spooky23 5y ago
        In my case, the upstream ERP was there for historical reasons and literally wasn’t used beyond a few reports. The old system wasn’t modified with the business as it grew. We obviously didn’t stay with excel :)
        texasbigdata 5y ago
        And hey if you did you were just early on inventing airtable :)
spaetzleesser 5y ago
My company had a lot of data in SAP and also a lot of data in Salesforce (don't ask me how they decided what to put where). Sometimes we need data from one or the other for projects and so far it was always that getting SAP data was extremely tedious to impossible while getting Salesforce data is usually pretty straightforward. I am not sure if that's caused by the teams that manage the systems but it's definitely very notiecable.
yepthatsreality 5y ago
Salesforce is a master work of lock-in-as-a-product (LIAAP). The best part is that it’s not even a good or original product. It’s success lies in the company’s ability to sell a mega package of trivial CRM systems to non-technical sales people. It may eventually wear thin but it’s target demographic is spectacularly niche and self-consuming that there’s little need to disrupt it. And while sales people tell other sales people they need Salesforce in order to not maintain a software stack of their own. Those same other sales people turn around and tell developers to maintain integration with the Salesforce APIs.
JCM9 5y ago
The trouble with Salesforce is that it’s turned into the very thing they set out to replace. It’s big, unwieldy, clunky, and frustrating to use. It’s “SaaS” which was an upgrade on what they replaced initially, but seems like they’re increasingly the ones bound to be “disrupted.”
- Firehawke 5y ago
  Scope creep from hell.
- joshribakoff 5y ago
  Retool recently released “modules”, and it made me think the same thing, that this is one step closer to the thing they’re trying to replace. Resolving merge conflicts in json (which is what defines a retool app) is another area where the benefits of “yes code” become more obvious. “No code” is not something I’m convinced is good. I personally think embracing code (but making it optional) leads to a platform more developers would enjoy To pick on salesforce a bit, notice how the example of how to define the drop down they are using XML. That’s not “no code”, it’s just a constrained form of coding. Basically any library or framework that embraces code can also offer higher level abstractions just like Retool or Salesforce, without having to have the “no code” part to solve the problem. “No code” is also tangential to being a saas product, these tools could work more like codesandbox than dreamweaver or frontpage, for example.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    But was one supposed to write that code in the example oneself? I thought it showed code generated by this venerated "no-code" tool... If that's not the case, then the whole "no-code" moniker is marketing BS.
tinyhouse 5y ago
Nothing against Salesforce but please don't call it a software company. They are not a software company but rather an investor. They invest and acquire other companies. The majority of their revenues still come from their investments rather than their products. To their credit they have been doing some great investments over the years, but they have no capabilities of building anything themselves. Now, I know all tech companies buy other companies. That's not new. But most tech companies also have some capabilities to innovate and building new stuff. That's an important difference. Buying a small tech company to accelerate development of a particular product is different than buying a company like Slack which already dominates the market and can be integrated into the eco system and then transition to mostly maintenance.
- slap_shot 5y ago
  Why can't they be both? They literally are a software company. And yes, they acquire other software companies. Plenty of companies in other industries (e.g. consumer goods) are conglomerates, often a result of acquisitions - it doesn't make them pure "investors."
  - tinyhouse 5y ago
    I don't argue they are qualified to be called a software company. They make money from software after all (at least partly). But they are not a software company in the sense that they don't build technology. Their specialty is buying and selling software and investing in software companies (check one of their 10-K filings). For me personally they are not a software company since building software is not their core business. They operate the same way pure investors operate, with the difference they often buy an entire company rather than just owning a subset of the company (but they do both). Update: I see my original comment is getting downvoted. I knew I'm going to upset some sensitive Salesforce employees here :)
    - jjeaff 5y ago
      So do they really not do any development in house to speak of? Or do you just mean it isn't their core competency?
kh1 5y ago
Is it just me or does the Apex screenshot look better than many enterprise websites we see nowadays?
- loloquwowndueo 5y ago
  It’s just you. It’s not terrible but looks like something out of the 90s and has a “detergent newspaper ad” vibe to it.
slap_shot 5y ago
I really enjoy these articles. I don't know a ton about Retool, but I know these articles are often written by or in the style of their Growth analyst, Justin Gage (https://randomshit.dev/ https://randomshit.dev/) who seems to be fantastic at writing articles about what these are and how they work in his own right. These types of posts are a refreshing change from what company blogs have become (or maybe always were?): garbage vendor content pushing their agenda. I understand how Retool could be used to do some really cool stuff on top of Salesforce, but this post is also just an informative expose of an industry giant. Justin recently did another one about Accenture, whom I worked for a while back, and really appreciate the story that is being told. Kudos for these fantastic posts. I look forward to reading these every time i see reool.com pop up.
- deleted 5y ago
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- gagejustins 5y ago
  this is the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me :) although all credit for this one goes to Taimur!
- adius 5y ago
  Can you please post a link to the article about Accenture? Sounds interesting
  - slap_shot 5y ago
    HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26969364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26969364
jbverschoor 5y ago
Its not very promising when you really don’t understand the biggest player in your space
johnx123-up 5y ago
Previous discussion in 2019 with 234 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277115
- corentin88 5y ago
  Title should include that it’s a post from 2019
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
This was a great write-up. I shared it with a friend that recently joined them.
mtoddsmith 5y ago
My company had 3 instances at one point after acquisitions. Two of them got merged so we’re stuck with two because of the number of customizations and the different sales approaches / teams between the two divisions. One of them upgraded to lightning required by some feature. The experience nice with lightning (even slower) has been worse than classic. Meanwhile the other instance is till on classic. We made the mistake of embedding business logic into sales force and integrated with their API only later to find out it can take upwards of a minute to just convert a lead to a contact via API depending on the current load on the system. Enterprise systems are fun.
fizx 5y ago
Workday is also a CRUD app-builder, but for HR professionals. What other typical company functions have this sort of provider? Conversely, what other company functions need this sort of provider?
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Every function. Shipping/receiving, field service, mailing, facility management. Cruddy apps like Servicenow and Salesforce are goldmines for process management. All you need to do is be marginally better than Oracle/etc.
mangopi 5y ago
What is Salesforce? JAVA BY AVON
- tannhaeuser 5y ago
  Probably I'm not getting the joke, but Sf actually uses a language called Apex on top of Java on the backend I believe.
throwitaway1235 5y ago
"Salesforce’s point-and-click database editor and drag-and-drop UI builder alone make it much more than a CRM. But when you bolt on other apps and 3rd-party APIs, it gets close to programming without code: a new way to build software." Seems analogous to Wordpress for building websites, without actually knowing how to build websites, yes/no?
- IneffablePigeon 5y ago
  Absolutely, it's not a perfect analogy but it's a surprisingly good one. The value is in the sheer size of the ecosystem and the idea of everything being plug and play, even if the reality often necessitates actual code when you get past the happy demo path to your business's weird edge cases.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Yeah, much of the article reads like free advertising for Salesforce.
EricE 5y ago
Act! back in the 90's right around the time Symantec bought them. Seemed to be just about perfect for what most small businesses would need. Out of nostalgia I did some searching and the amount of times it changed hands and what they are charging (per month!) for it now I can only imagine - it's probably as heavyweight or more so than SalesForce. Salesforce just has a weird flow. I think I have the gist of it, but man do you have to use it for quite a while before it starts to make sense - all while you wait and wait and wait for anything to happen after you submit something. Ugh.
maram 5y ago
Interesting to Salesforce is trending in these times Cannot wait to see “What’s Adobe?” =)
- abhishekjha 5y ago
  What is adobe though? I have a tough time explaining it to people. I mean is google still just a search engine?
chaostheory 5y ago
The most interesting thing in this post was that Mark worked for Apple in 1984 and stayed in good terms with Jobs long enough so that he was still Benioff’s mentor in the 2000s before Jobs died
- sjg007 5y ago
  Marc Benioff's book Trailblazer goes into that story a bit more. The rest of the book is pretty good too. This thread seems dedicated to picking Salesforce apart from the technical side but you should really look at it from the business value side and as an ecosytem. Salesforce has certainly defined digital transformation for a lot of companies. Anyone that wants to beat Salesforce is going to have to be 10x better or come in from a new or niche angle. No code, slack/chat interfaces and AI assistants seem to be viable paths.
throwawaysea 5y ago
Retool also had a great post in the past demystifying what SAP is: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ It’s amazing content in an otherwise opaque category of enterprise software and services, which are so strongly embedded in part because no one knows what they do and how they’re used in practice.
diveanon 5y ago
I'm conflicted on Salesforce. As a user I am firmly in the camp that believes it is garbage to use and overpriced. As a developer and contractor it paid for my first home.
pachico 5y ago
No CTO was ever fired for choosing Salesforce, Jira, Oracle, ...
- protonfish 5y ago
  But they should have been.
  - pachico 5y ago
    I agree
inthewoods 5y ago
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 everything to Contacts. But it has always seemed like a bad decision to have both. - There is a long line of companies that have tried and are trying to disrupt Salesforce - none have succeed and my take is that this is because of the ecosystem and app exchange. That makes it very challenging to overcome. - Salesforce has made improvements in their interface (Lightning is, by most counts, an improvement), but an entire industries exists to make up for the shortcomings of Salesforce. Sending emails directly or programmatically is pain, so we have Outreach and Salesloft. Entering data is too slow - so there's Dooly. Their marketing reporting stinks - so there is Fullcircle and Bizible. They own Pardot, yet somehow still can't top Marketo, Hubspot or Eloqua - which is a pretty amazing fail imho. And the Pardot integration really doesn't add a ton of value over other solutions. But as noted above, this weakness is also a strength because you've got a huge ecosystem. If I'm starting a company right now, I'd probably go with Hubspot because there is just enormous power in the simplicity of having all of the data for both marketing and sales in a single system. Not that Hubspot doesn't have it's own issues, but reporting has always been a huge problem at every company so if I can't avoid this pain even a little, I'd consider it a big win.
- mym1990 5y ago
  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 only CRM I know in my fairly young career, I can definitely see many of its shortcomings and do not envy the engineers/product managers that have to address those. I think if someone is starting a company, Salesforce is not the right option, both because it is extremely expensive, and its not exactly plug and play if you're looking for customizations.
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corentin88 5y ago
The site has a CSS issue that prevents the "Retool" logo to be clicked on mobile. If someone from Retool reads this, it's related to ".site-header::after" having an absolute positionning AFAICT.
mym1990 5y ago
I have been working on the Salesforce platform for about 3 years now, and it has been a pretty enlightening experience(good and bad). It has certainly been lucrative as well. I would say that a lot of the issues around Salesforce stem from how easy it is to write or configure a terrible solution. Something that looks like it works but is so far from any sort of optimization. Much of Salesforce implementation development also goes unvetted by the client. I have worked and currently work on projects where I constantly ask 'how did this ever make it into production...and how has no one noticed that this is hot garbage for 4 years'. Eventually someone digs deep enough and whoever is managing that project at the time gets the brunt of the blame unfortunately...
TruthWillHurt 5y ago
I'm always amazed at how the simplest solutions have the biggest impact on business users. Us devs often try to invent groundbreaking software, while all they needed was to automate a rollodex...
Lornedon 5y ago
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.
- chupchap 5y ago
  > 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 Have you tried marking fields for user set IDs as external IDs. This field can then be used while doing upsert. But what do you mean by there is no way to import it? Apart from Dataloader there are a host of companies that offer this feature.
  - Lornedon 5y ago
    Suppose a bad actor has gotten full access to our Salesforce, deleted everything and emptied out the recycling bin. We need to restore everything. Luckily, we used the weekly export feature and have all our data, we only need to get it back into Salesforce. But how do we do that? - Dataloader can only restore one object at a time. We have 350 different objects. - We need to restore the relationships between objects. They are saved by Id, but we can't keep the original Id. So we have to keep track of the original Id and the new Id for each inserted record, and replace them in every other object. That also means we have to insert the objects in topological order. If there are any cycles or self-relationships (like Account.ParentAccount), we have to fill in the Field with NULL first and update it later. - Even after all this effort, we still can't recreate the values for autonumbered fields. If it's a custom field, we can change the type to text, insert the values and change it back. For standard fields, there is no practical way to do it. No company can help us, because it's just impossible to do using the Salesforce API.
fersarr 5y ago
"So he gave Salesforce simple subscription pricing that scaled according to usage. In 1999, it was $50/user per month. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) was born." I would say that the Bloomberg terminal was an earlier example of a SaaS.
- sumedh 5y ago
  I guess Salesforce was pure software while Bloomberg was hardware plus software.
timoth3y 5y ago
Salesforce is this generation's Lotus Notes. It's incredibly powerful software that when implemented well, can streamline processes, provide easy access to information, and make teams really efficient. However, it rarely seems to be implemented well.
- vxNsr 5y ago
  Lotus notes was single process bound. I worked at a company that I believe is still using it today, really sucked when you started a search in one tab and then the whole program became unresponsive until it completed the search.
freetime2 5y ago
I've done quite a bit of Salesforce development in my career. First as a full-time employee at the start of my career, and later on as part-time side gigs. There are a lot of negative comments here about Salesforce, and they are mostly all valid. Salesforce is not the least bit sexy, and can often be frustrating for both developers and users. There are a couple of good things about it that I wanted to share though: * A single developer can be incredibly productive at automating a company's business processes. Fresh out of college at my first job I was the only developer supporting hundreds of daily users across our sales, customer support, operations, and finance departments - most of whom were basically working out of Salesforce full-time. Salesforce also proved really adaptable for supporting all of the crazy sales campaigns or operations initiatives that management could dream up - often with quick turnaround times. For me there is no question that the Saleforce licensing costs (or some other low-code alternative) are worthwhile for most businesses vs. trying to build internal systems from scratch. * Developers are in high demand, and I have received lots of requests from former colleagues looking for a Salesforce developer - even a decade after I moved away from full-time Salesforce development. When I have accepted these offers I've literally been told I can charge however much I want (although I do tend to keep it reasonable). * You tend to have much more direct contact with your users than in other B2B or B2C development roles. And users are often super-appreciative of even simple changes. It really is a great feeling to see the difference that your work makes firsthand, and I have had some great working relationships with sales and support managers over the years. * The core Salesforce platform (forms and data modeling, workflow, API integration, etc.) is actually an incredible piece of product design and engineering in my opinion. I know it's getting long in the tooth these days, but the team that built all of that deserves credit for getting so much of it right. All the stuff that Salesforce has built or acquired since then, unfortunately, has been much less impressive. * Salesforce is expensive for sure, but not as bad as the pricing on their website would suggest. Apparently nobody pays the list price for Salesforce licenses, and a 50% discount from the list prices is not uncommon in my experience. Ultimately I am glad I decided to get out of Salesforce development if only because the developer experience with almost any other programming language is just so much nicer. But I learned a lot from the experience - and I think those early interactions with users and firsthand experience of how business are run have made me a more well-rounded developer. I was also able to use the skills that I learned while doing Salesforce development to transition into a role building web applications, and pursue a more traditional development career. And now as I am eyeing retirement, I am contemplating getting back into Salesforce consulting on a part-time basis.
rawgabbit 5y ago
Where I work, we are planning to ditch our very expensive web portals and mobile apps to go all-in with Salesforce. We plan to build several Salesforce lightning communities to be used as our front-end portals. Salesforce will convert these communities to mobile apps as part of our contract. Along with the base Salesforce org, we have Marketo (marketing), Service Cloud (customer support), Financial Force (ERP), Tableau (BI), Tableau CRM/Einstein Analytics (analytics), B2B, and Mulesoft. The only products I question are Financial Force, B2B, and Mulesoft as they are very expensive for what you get.
- thrav 5y ago
  FinancialForce is an entirely different company pretending to be part of Salesforce.
rtpg 5y ago
Salesforce is uniquely amazing in that its development and extension environment is extremely close to the dreams of Smalltalk developers and the like. Loads of extensibility and introspection possible on basically every view of your system. Yeah it’s slow but honestly you’re spending most of your time looking at the data and writing it up, the slowness doesn’t matter that much in the long run imo.
lolive 5y ago
The true question is: what is the light open-source "it simply works" alternative?
- CRConrad 5y ago
  I think Wikipedia has a list. Perhaps not just of FOSS CRM, but usually their lists of software have a License column; with a bit of luck you can sort the table on it. Otherwise, copy-paste it into a spreadsheet and sort it there.
collyw 5y ago
Worst piece of software I have ever had to use as a developer. The API is horrible and clunky.
Lapsa 5y ago
pioneered much [citation needed]
dannyphantom 5y ago
As someone who has spent the past several months using Trailhead to learn Salesforce - even picking up some badges for things that seem practical this thread is making me reconsider my choices. Have I wasted my time in learning Salesforce? I know that there is what is effectively a cult following of Salesforce evangelists but I was hoping this would be valuable in the long term.
georgesC 5y ago
Build your own custom and in house CRM that you know from top to bottom, which does precisely what your company needs. And keep it closed in your private network.
amaccuish 5y ago
our company impletemented salesforce because SAP was too expensive. that is all.

290 points by eddywebs 5y ago

adzm 5y ago

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 impossible to get to the beginning of long discussions. URLs are long and crazy and have no useful info or anything cool in them. We've had Salesforce consultants and experts come in and gain a second or two here or there but it's been an awful experience over the last 5 years.

vbsteven 5y ago
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.
- jonplackett 5y ago
  Netsuite is stuck 30 years ago at least. So painful and insanely slow. It’s like having dial up again.
  - mrwnmonm 5y ago
    Which ERP isn't?
    - jonplackett 5y ago
      Maybe none? I think Netsuite is particularly slow though. Luckily I only have to use it for timesheets but even for that it should have its own job number for the time wasted waiting for it to load.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  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 choice of adding 2 orders of magntitude to the cost, and decreasing quality by 1 order of magnitude, or some other combination of this. That leaves you with a few options: 1. Don't allow businesses to customize at all, make them fit to you. That can work with something like ADP, but little else. A lot of the cool B2B startups think they can displace incumbents by just building cool, fast software, and then they are perplexed why they can't gain marketshare when every other customer has some bespoke use case they don't support. 2. Build a general uber-programmable platform that businesses can customize themselves -- now you are in the "slow", "poor user experience" territory but at least it works and is cheaper than option 3 3. Hire consultants to write bespoke products from scratch for each business. That's the old IBM Services model. So if your baseline is Microsoft Office, then the performance/user experience of your favorite online B2B platform is going to be terrible. But if your baseline is IBM Services, then it's a godsend.
  - rvanmil 5y ago
    Choose 3 and then watch the consultants build the custom software using a low/no code platform. Now you are still in the slow and poor user experience and no customization options and more expensive and worse support ;-) I think it’s pretty sad that enterprise software is mostly stuck the way you describe. There are companies willing to invest in fast and user friendly custom software though; the company I work for is pretty successful at doing just that.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      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. Really if you think you can do better than X, whether X is oracle forms or SAP or whatnot, it's important to understand where X went wrong. Hint: it's very rarely because they were "old-fashioned" or didn't realize that customers liked fast software that was easy to use. The founders of X were just as smart/capable as you are, but they faced a market challenge and made some choices with trade offs. If you limit your analysis to "they didn't know software should be fast", then you are not going to end up any better than they are once you reach their scale. I am not trying to say that every incumbent always made the right choices. But an understanding of where they went wrong needs to go beyond "they went wrong because they are old fashioned" or "they went wrong because they didn't realize software shouldn't be filled with bugs". There are real hard problems here that need to be understood before you are in a position to improve on what the incumbents are doing.
- tootie 5y ago
  Once an enterprise reaches a certain level of scale that amount of complexity is almost unavoidable. Tools like Salesforce and JIRA are great for providing the needed flexibility within guard rails and a shared vernacular.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  I am going through this right now in a project. A lot of configurations break the database model and can't be really modeled by the database so you end up doing a lot in code which is way slower. Seems we need a type of database that can support these super-flexible customizable data models better. Maybe something where the data model and stored procedures written in a language like C#, Java or JS are understood by the database and optimized.
NineStarPoint 5y ago
Yeah, I’m definitely not convinced there are configurations of salesforce that aren’t terrible. Other products that are often configured terribly I’ve generally seen an example or two of one that actually was better, but I’ve never seen a salesforce that wasn’t slow as molasses.
t0mas88 5y ago
It's slow and the UI is stuck in 1999 unless you pay extra for what they sell as the more modern UI, which takes you from 20+ years behind to only like 5 years outdated.
- iratewizard 5y ago
  Lighting is free. The only time you have to pay more is to get custom pieces of your system built in classic rebuilt. In what ways are lightning's UI "5 years outdated?"
dylan604 5y ago
Is it heavy JS load on the client side, or slow processing on server side that causes this sluggishness?
- bigfudge 5y ago
  I think it’s probably both. The api and db querying are dog slow too.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Let's hope it's not something laughably simple as adding indexes to their tables! I mean, that's like something I'd forget and I don't even play a DBA on TV
- iratewizard 5y ago
  The typical JS heap is above 90MB out of the box. Locker service is the main culprit for that, and Locker Service does cause some slowdown. Server-side, they are multitenant and the tenants you are sharing compute with are frequently running massive data operations on a regular basis. Those tenants have no incentive to get things running faster because they don't pay for compute hours. As long as the operations run within Salesforce's governor limits, who cares? Salesforce's response to the client-side half of the problem is migrating from Aura to Lightning Web Components. LWC is statically analyzable and Aura is not, so they can get some optimizations in that way. On the flip-side, LWC is a piss-poor framework because of how they've stunted it for optimization's sake. Half of the beauty of Salesforce as a developer is the fact that I can build in a month what would typically take a standard web dev team a year to piece together. That's only true so long as my team works in Aura with all of the scaffolding tools and libraries we've built over the years.
dzhiurgis 5y ago
URL’s is probably one thing that Salesforce solved well, at least in classic - you’re always routed to the right page by 15 character ID.
wnevets 5y ago
But it's enterprise software and real companies use enterprise software, so if we use it we'll also be a real company!
kradroy 5y ago
You're not the intended user of Salesforce. The UIs and flows you use are mostly data entry funnels for the true user: management and executives. You didn't pay for the software; they did. "End-user" satisfaction is low on the product feature list. Every time your client slows down, somewhere an executive was promoted.
- orangesquirrel 5y ago
  I made a similar observation while working at a Fortune 500 company that used Salesforce. Decisions about the company's Salesforce implementation were clearly made by people who didn't care too much about data entry UX. The problem was that they did care greatly about data entry -- and data entry, at least in part due to being needlessly cumbersome, tended to fall far short of expectations.
- 40four 5y ago
  I’m not sure I understand your point? My understanding is the intended users of Salesforce are most certainly the sales team. And I say this out of experience with using it as part of a sales team at a car dealership I worked at years ago. Every sales person in the company was expected to log all the customers they interacted with, track phone numbers & other info, set reminders to makes sales calls, make notes of what you talked about in said sales calls, et cetera, et cetera. And management was adamant that we did these things. And for good reason. Sales is a very data driven industry, so to your point yes, it’s great for upper management to be able to track & aggregate all of the data company wide. It’s been too long since I used it for me to really remember or comment on the performance of the software. But if it’s as bad as the OP is saying that’s a real problem. If you have a whole sales team using this, and performance issues are constantly slowing them down and wasting time, that’s something that should seriously be addressed. I guess you’re saying though that they just don’t care if the sales team experience sucks? As long as management gets their data?
  - e3bc54b2 5y ago
    > intended users of Salesforce are most certainly the sales team. Alas, intended users are seldom the ones writing checks. As the old saying goes, decision to go with Oracle happens on golf course, not meeting room.
Yabood 5y ago
Couldn't agree more! I'd like to add to that the terrible UX. In fact, Salesforce is so terrible that there are dozens of businesses built around just configuring it for you.

stevebmark 5y ago

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 them over APIs to external systems. The platform is both powerful and pretty clunky. Salesforce development is consistently 20 years behind established best practices. Learning Salesforce means learning the thousands of limitations and broken parts of the ecosystem. And it’s non transferable knowledge.

echelon 5y ago
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.
- spamalot159 5y ago
  You're right and I think people have tried but nobody has made a killer product yet. Everyone is either trying to copy Salesforce or too niche.
  - leeoniya 5y ago
    in my experience, every vendor we looked at who competes with salesforce is not interested in your business unless they are allowed to take over your entire backoffice. for example, we only wanted it for the CRM and order ingestion via manual entry & API, and that was okay, while other vendors insisted on also taking over our inventory management, invoicing, fulfillment, etc, rather than allowing us to simply integrate with the minimal set of APIs which we needed to sync our systems with theirs.
    - hubspotthrow 5y ago
      Give Hubspot a gander. We want to handle your entire front office. But we're also perfectly content just handling customer data and gdpr requests for you.

spamalot159 5y ago

I'm just waiting for Salesforce to be disrupted. It has become so large and all encompassing that it is hard to get into for the lower end. Seems like a ripe area for a low end competitor but I haven't seen anything great yet.

Phurist 5y ago
Does Pipedrive work ?
joezydeco 5y ago
That's what Excel is for. I'm only half joking.
ryanSrich 5y ago
That’s a tall hill to climb. Not because it’s hard to make a better product, many already exist. But because it’s engrained into the DNA that makes up an enterprise. At some point you just buy Salesforce. Not because you need it, or even because you want it. It just manifests itself. You don’t get fired for buying Salesforce.
howmayiannoyyou 5y ago
Having evaluated dozens of CRMs to replace my company's internally built system, here's my five cents: - Salesforce is slow, expensive after adding add-ons, costly to customize, and visually unappealing. The older and less tech-friendly workers I've surveyed found it painful to use. The same might be said of many Salesforce competitors, including MSFT Dynamics and Netsuite. SugarCRM also has many of the same failings, but its UI/UX is better IMHO. - Close.io, Pipedrive, Salesloft, Nethunt, Nutshell, Nimble and few others have a simpler and more engaging take on CRM that seems to be easier for a wider variety of users to adopt. - A big chunk of CRM's perceived value is better found through sales training that focuses on qualifying customers and good work habits. - CRM cannot turn most under or non-performing salespeople into performers. - Many performing workers will resist adding contacts and data to a CRM for several reasons, self-preservation instinct being most prominent. - Nurture marketing, once a CRM innovation, has become an annoyance for client/customer prospects... particularly over email. - Predictive CRM requires either a lot of data to train, or hard to obtain signals. The concept underachieves. The next great thing may very well be inversion of CRM, whereby your customers/clients automate the acquisition, evaluation, negotiation and purchase of products or services. At the enterprise level this exists for commodity products & services, but it's largely non-existent at the SMB/SOHO level. The normalization and quantification problem is significant, but I'm confident ML will address some of these challenges in due time. Tl;dr ... there's still no substitute for hiring the right people. Charisma, emotional intelligence & motivation always surpasses sales automation.

azure10 5y ago

Company is moving away from salesforce and I don’t regret it

kamyarg 5y ago
Can you share the reasoning? How was the "cost" of migration justified vs. <insert problems with Salesforce>?

te_chris 5y ago

Salesforce is a full business app development platform with almost unmatched flexibility, fully hosted and programmable. CRM doesn’t really begin to cover it. This reads like I’m a zealot. I’m not. But there is nothing that I’ve seen that can do what it can do and, if you know how it works, you can leverage it for incredible time and efficiency savings for developing and deploying business apps.

chasd00 5y ago
This is true, if you really know what you’re doing you can make salesforce sing. If you actually understand its breadth and depth Salesforce is a pretty amazing platform.
louisvgchi 5y ago
Similar things said of Drupal.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lbj 5y ago

Salesforce is amazing, in the sense that it truly lives up to its name. Everytime I've been hired into an executive role I've cancelled our Salesforce subscription and productivity has gone up. Its clunky, slow and overly complex if you ask me. But their success cannot be denied, thus they must have an amazing salesforce.

howmayiannoyyou 5y ago
"Everytime I've been hired into an executive role I've cancelled our Salesforce subscription and productivity has gone up." ... Great observation. But what did you replace it with?
- Spooky23 5y ago
  I did something similar at a smaller scale migrating away from Oracle to the Excel spreadsheets in SharePoint that fed everything anyway. Lol
  - texasbigdata 5y ago
    I heard moving into a new home and then immediately burning it down to camp in the back yard is great for the maximizing your Daily Steps KPI also. This conversation of "what I did":"what the outcome was":"what the goal was":"what the organization needs to win" seems a bit imprecise.
    - Spooky23 5y ago
      In my case, the upstream ERP was there for historical reasons and literally wasn’t used beyond a few reports. The old system wasn’t modified with the business as it grew. We obviously didn’t stay with excel :)
      - texasbigdata 5y ago
        And hey if you did you were just early on inventing airtable :)

spaetzleesser 5y ago

My company had a lot of data in SAP and also a lot of data in Salesforce (don't ask me how they decided what to put where). Sometimes we need data from one or the other for projects and so far it was always that getting SAP data was extremely tedious to impossible while getting Salesforce data is usually pretty straightforward. I am not sure if that's caused by the teams that manage the systems but it's definitely very notiecable.

yepthatsreality 5y ago

Salesforce is a master work of lock-in-as-a-product (LIAAP). The best part is that it’s not even a good or original product. It’s success lies in the company’s ability to sell a mega package of trivial CRM systems to non-technical sales people. It may eventually wear thin but it’s target demographic is spectacularly niche and self-consuming that there’s little need to disrupt it. And while sales people tell other sales people they need Salesforce in order to not maintain a software stack of their own. Those same other sales people turn around and tell developers to maintain integration with the Salesforce APIs.

JCM9 5y ago

The trouble with Salesforce is that it’s turned into the very thing they set out to replace. It’s big, unwieldy, clunky, and frustrating to use. It’s “SaaS” which was an upgrade on what they replaced initially, but seems like they’re increasingly the ones bound to be “disrupted.”

Firehawke 5y ago
Scope creep from hell.
joshribakoff 5y ago
Retool recently released “modules”, and it made me think the same thing, that this is one step closer to the thing they’re trying to replace. Resolving merge conflicts in json (which is what defines a retool app) is another area where the benefits of “yes code” become more obvious. “No code” is not something I’m convinced is good. I personally think embracing code (but making it optional) leads to a platform more developers would enjoy To pick on salesforce a bit, notice how the example of how to define the drop down they are using XML. That’s not “no code”, it’s just a constrained form of coding. Basically any library or framework that embraces code can also offer higher level abstractions just like Retool or Salesforce, without having to have the “no code” part to solve the problem. “No code” is also tangential to being a saas product, these tools could work more like codesandbox than dreamweaver or frontpage, for example.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  But was one supposed to write that code in the example oneself? I thought it showed code generated by this venerated "no-code" tool... If that's not the case, then the whole "no-code" moniker is marketing BS.

tinyhouse 5y ago

Nothing against Salesforce but please don't call it a software company. They are not a software company but rather an investor. They invest and acquire other companies. The majority of their revenues still come from their investments rather than their products. To their credit they have been doing some great investments over the years, but they have no capabilities of building anything themselves. Now, I know all tech companies buy other companies. That's not new. But most tech companies also have some capabilities to innovate and building new stuff. That's an important difference. Buying a small tech company to accelerate development of a particular product is different than buying a company like Slack which already dominates the market and can be integrated into the eco system and then transition to mostly maintenance.

slap_shot 5y ago
Why can't they be both? They literally are a software company. And yes, they acquire other software companies. Plenty of companies in other industries (e.g. consumer goods) are conglomerates, often a result of acquisitions - it doesn't make them pure "investors."
- tinyhouse 5y ago
  I don't argue they are qualified to be called a software company. They make money from software after all (at least partly). But they are not a software company in the sense that they don't build technology. Their specialty is buying and selling software and investing in software companies (check one of their 10-K filings). For me personally they are not a software company since building software is not their core business. They operate the same way pure investors operate, with the difference they often buy an entire company rather than just owning a subset of the company (but they do both). Update: I see my original comment is getting downvoted. I knew I'm going to upset some sensitive Salesforce employees here :)
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    So do they really not do any development in house to speak of? Or do you just mean it isn't their core competency?

kh1 5y ago

Is it just me or does the Apex screenshot look better than many enterprise websites we see nowadays?

loloquwowndueo 5y ago
It’s just you. It’s not terrible but looks like something out of the 90s and has a “detergent newspaper ad” vibe to it.

slap_shot 5y ago

I really enjoy these articles. I don't know a ton about Retool, but I know these articles are often written by or in the style of their Growth analyst, Justin Gage (https://randomshit.dev/ https://randomshit.dev/) who seems to be fantastic at writing articles about what these are and how they work in his own right. These types of posts are a refreshing change from what company blogs have become (or maybe always were?): garbage vendor content pushing their agenda. I understand how Retool could be used to do some really cool stuff on top of Salesforce, but this post is also just an informative expose of an industry giant. Justin recently did another one about Accenture, whom I worked for a while back, and really appreciate the story that is being told. Kudos for these fantastic posts. I look forward to reading these every time i see reool.com pop up.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gagejustins 5y ago
this is the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me :) although all credit for this one goes to Taimur!
adius 5y ago
Can you please post a link to the article about Accenture? Sounds interesting
- slap_shot 5y ago
  HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26969364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26969364

jbverschoor 5y ago

Its not very promising when you really don’t understand the biggest player in your space

johnx123-up 5y ago

Previous discussion in 2019 with 234 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277115

corentin88 5y ago
Title should include that it’s a post from 2019

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

This was a great write-up. I shared it with a friend that recently joined them.

mtoddsmith 5y ago

My company had 3 instances at one point after acquisitions. Two of them got merged so we’re stuck with two because of the number of customizations and the different sales approaches / teams between the two divisions. One of them upgraded to lightning required by some feature. The experience nice with lightning (even slower) has been worse than classic. Meanwhile the other instance is till on classic. We made the mistake of embedding business logic into sales force and integrated with their API only later to find out it can take upwards of a minute to just convert a lead to a contact via API depending on the current load on the system. Enterprise systems are fun.

fizx 5y ago

Workday is also a CRUD app-builder, but for HR professionals. What other typical company functions have this sort of provider? Conversely, what other company functions need this sort of provider?

Spooky23 5y ago
Every function. Shipping/receiving, field service, mailing, facility management. Cruddy apps like Servicenow and Salesforce are goldmines for process management. All you need to do is be marginally better than Oracle/etc.

mangopi 5y ago

What is Salesforce? JAVA BY AVON

tannhaeuser 5y ago
Probably I'm not getting the joke, but Sf actually uses a language called Apex on top of Java on the backend I believe.

throwitaway1235 5y ago

"Salesforce’s point-and-click database editor and drag-and-drop UI builder alone make it much more than a CRM. But when you bolt on other apps and 3rd-party APIs, it gets close to programming without code: a new way to build software." Seems analogous to Wordpress for building websites, without actually knowing how to build websites, yes/no?

IneffablePigeon 5y ago
Absolutely, it's not a perfect analogy but it's a surprisingly good one. The value is in the sheer size of the ecosystem and the idea of everything being plug and play, even if the reality often necessitates actual code when you get past the happy demo path to your business's weird edge cases.
CRConrad 5y ago
Yeah, much of the article reads like free advertising for Salesforce.

EricE 5y ago

Act! back in the 90's right around the time Symantec bought them. Seemed to be just about perfect for what most small businesses would need. Out of nostalgia I did some searching and the amount of times it changed hands and what they are charging (per month!) for it now I can only imagine - it's probably as heavyweight or more so than SalesForce. Salesforce just has a weird flow. I think I have the gist of it, but man do you have to use it for quite a while before it starts to make sense - all while you wait and wait and wait for anything to happen after you submit something. Ugh.

maram 5y ago

Interesting to Salesforce is trending in these times Cannot wait to see “What’s Adobe?” =)

abhishekjha 5y ago
What is adobe though? I have a tough time explaining it to people. I mean is google still just a search engine?

chaostheory 5y ago

The most interesting thing in this post was that Mark worked for Apple in 1984 and stayed in good terms with Jobs long enough so that he was still Benioff’s mentor in the 2000s before Jobs died

sjg007 5y ago
Marc Benioff's book Trailblazer goes into that story a bit more. The rest of the book is pretty good too. This thread seems dedicated to picking Salesforce apart from the technical side but you should really look at it from the business value side and as an ecosytem. Salesforce has certainly defined digital transformation for a lot of companies. Anyone that wants to beat Salesforce is going to have to be 10x better or come in from a new or niche angle. No code, slack/chat interfaces and AI assistants seem to be viable paths.

throwawaysea 5y ago

Retool also had a great post in the past demystifying what SAP is: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ It’s amazing content in an otherwise opaque category of enterprise software and services, which are so strongly embedded in part because no one knows what they do and how they’re used in practice.

diveanon 5y ago

I'm conflicted on Salesforce. As a user I am firmly in the camp that believes it is garbage to use and overpriced. As a developer and contractor it paid for my first home.

pachico 5y ago

No CTO was ever fired for choosing Salesforce, Jira, Oracle, ...

protonfish 5y ago
But they should have been.
- pachico 5y ago
  I agree

inthewoods 5y ago

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 everything to Contacts. But it has always seemed like a bad decision to have both. - There is a long line of companies that have tried and are trying to disrupt Salesforce - none have succeed and my take is that this is because of the ecosystem and app exchange. That makes it very challenging to overcome. - Salesforce has made improvements in their interface (Lightning is, by most counts, an improvement), but an entire industries exists to make up for the shortcomings of Salesforce. Sending emails directly or programmatically is pain, so we have Outreach and Salesloft. Entering data is too slow - so there's Dooly. Their marketing reporting stinks - so there is Fullcircle and Bizible. They own Pardot, yet somehow still can't top Marketo, Hubspot or Eloqua - which is a pretty amazing fail imho. And the Pardot integration really doesn't add a ton of value over other solutions. But as noted above, this weakness is also a strength because you've got a huge ecosystem. If I'm starting a company right now, I'd probably go with Hubspot because there is just enormous power in the simplicity of having all of the data for both marketing and sales in a single system. Not that Hubspot doesn't have it's own issues, but reporting has always been a huge problem at every company so if I can't avoid this pain even a little, I'd consider it a big win.

mym1990 5y ago
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 only CRM I know in my fairly young career, I can definitely see many of its shortcomings and do not envy the engineers/product managers that have to address those. I think if someone is starting a company, Salesforce is not the right option, both because it is extremely expensive, and its not exactly plug and play if you're looking for customizations.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

corentin88 5y ago

The site has a CSS issue that prevents the "Retool" logo to be clicked on mobile. If someone from Retool reads this, it's related to ".site-header::after" having an absolute positionning AFAICT.

mym1990 5y ago

I have been working on the Salesforce platform for about 3 years now, and it has been a pretty enlightening experience(good and bad). It has certainly been lucrative as well. I would say that a lot of the issues around Salesforce stem from how easy it is to write or configure a terrible solution. Something that looks like it works but is so far from any sort of optimization. Much of Salesforce implementation development also goes unvetted by the client. I have worked and currently work on projects where I constantly ask 'how did this ever make it into production...and how has no one noticed that this is hot garbage for 4 years'. Eventually someone digs deep enough and whoever is managing that project at the time gets the brunt of the blame unfortunately...

TruthWillHurt 5y ago

I'm always amazed at how the simplest solutions have the biggest impact on business users. Us devs often try to invent groundbreaking software, while all they needed was to automate a rollodex...

Lornedon 5y ago

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.

chupchap 5y ago
> 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 Have you tried marking fields for user set IDs as external IDs. This field can then be used while doing upsert. But what do you mean by there is no way to import it? Apart from Dataloader there are a host of companies that offer this feature.
- Lornedon 5y ago
  Suppose a bad actor has gotten full access to our Salesforce, deleted everything and emptied out the recycling bin. We need to restore everything. Luckily, we used the weekly export feature and have all our data, we only need to get it back into Salesforce. But how do we do that? - Dataloader can only restore one object at a time. We have 350 different objects. - We need to restore the relationships between objects. They are saved by Id, but we can't keep the original Id. So we have to keep track of the original Id and the new Id for each inserted record, and replace them in every other object. That also means we have to insert the objects in topological order. If there are any cycles or self-relationships (like Account.ParentAccount), we have to fill in the Field with NULL first and update it later. - Even after all this effort, we still can't recreate the values for autonumbered fields. If it's a custom field, we can change the type to text, insert the values and change it back. For standard fields, there is no practical way to do it. No company can help us, because it's just impossible to do using the Salesforce API.

fersarr 5y ago

"So he gave Salesforce simple subscription pricing that scaled according to usage. In 1999, it was $50/user per month. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) was born." I would say that the Bloomberg terminal was an earlier example of a SaaS.

sumedh 5y ago
I guess Salesforce was pure software while Bloomberg was hardware plus software.

timoth3y 5y ago

Salesforce is this generation's Lotus Notes. It's incredibly powerful software that when implemented well, can streamline processes, provide easy access to information, and make teams really efficient. However, it rarely seems to be implemented well.

vxNsr 5y ago
Lotus notes was single process bound. I worked at a company that I believe is still using it today, really sucked when you started a search in one tab and then the whole program became unresponsive until it completed the search.

freetime2 5y ago

I've done quite a bit of Salesforce development in my career. First as a full-time employee at the start of my career, and later on as part-time side gigs. There are a lot of negative comments here about Salesforce, and they are mostly all valid. Salesforce is not the least bit sexy, and can often be frustrating for both developers and users. There are a couple of good things about it that I wanted to share though: * A single developer can be incredibly productive at automating a company's business processes. Fresh out of college at my first job I was the only developer supporting hundreds of daily users across our sales, customer support, operations, and finance departments - most of whom were basically working out of Salesforce full-time. Salesforce also proved really adaptable for supporting all of the crazy sales campaigns or operations initiatives that management could dream up - often with quick turnaround times. For me there is no question that the Saleforce licensing costs (or some other low-code alternative) are worthwhile for most businesses vs. trying to build internal systems from scratch. * Developers are in high demand, and I have received lots of requests from former colleagues looking for a Salesforce developer - even a decade after I moved away from full-time Salesforce development. When I have accepted these offers I've literally been told I can charge however much I want (although I do tend to keep it reasonable). * You tend to have much more direct contact with your users than in other B2B or B2C development roles. And users are often super-appreciative of even simple changes. It really is a great feeling to see the difference that your work makes firsthand, and I have had some great working relationships with sales and support managers over the years. * The core Salesforce platform (forms and data modeling, workflow, API integration, etc.) is actually an incredible piece of product design and engineering in my opinion. I know it's getting long in the tooth these days, but the team that built all of that deserves credit for getting so much of it right. All the stuff that Salesforce has built or acquired since then, unfortunately, has been much less impressive. * Salesforce is expensive for sure, but not as bad as the pricing on their website would suggest. Apparently nobody pays the list price for Salesforce licenses, and a 50% discount from the list prices is not uncommon in my experience. Ultimately I am glad I decided to get out of Salesforce development if only because the developer experience with almost any other programming language is just so much nicer. But I learned a lot from the experience - and I think those early interactions with users and firsthand experience of how business are run have made me a more well-rounded developer. I was also able to use the skills that I learned while doing Salesforce development to transition into a role building web applications, and pursue a more traditional development career. And now as I am eyeing retirement, I am contemplating getting back into Salesforce consulting on a part-time basis.

rawgabbit 5y ago

Where I work, we are planning to ditch our very expensive web portals and mobile apps to go all-in with Salesforce. We plan to build several Salesforce lightning communities to be used as our front-end portals. Salesforce will convert these communities to mobile apps as part of our contract. Along with the base Salesforce org, we have Marketo (marketing), Service Cloud (customer support), Financial Force (ERP), Tableau (BI), Tableau CRM/Einstein Analytics (analytics), B2B, and Mulesoft. The only products I question are Financial Force, B2B, and Mulesoft as they are very expensive for what you get.

thrav 5y ago
FinancialForce is an entirely different company pretending to be part of Salesforce.

rtpg 5y ago

Salesforce is uniquely amazing in that its development and extension environment is extremely close to the dreams of Smalltalk developers and the like. Loads of extensibility and introspection possible on basically every view of your system. Yeah it’s slow but honestly you’re spending most of your time looking at the data and writing it up, the slowness doesn’t matter that much in the long run imo.

lolive 5y ago

The true question is: what is the light open-source "it simply works" alternative?

CRConrad 5y ago
I think Wikipedia has a list. Perhaps not just of FOSS CRM, but usually their lists of software have a License column; with a bit of luck you can sort the table on it. Otherwise, copy-paste it into a spreadsheet and sort it there.

collyw 5y ago

Worst piece of software I have ever had to use as a developer. The API is horrible and clunky.

Lapsa 5y ago

pioneered much [citation needed]

dannyphantom 5y ago

As someone who has spent the past several months using Trailhead to learn Salesforce - even picking up some badges for things that seem practical this thread is making me reconsider my choices. Have I wasted my time in learning Salesforce? I know that there is what is effectively a cult following of Salesforce evangelists but I was hoping this would be valuable in the long term.

georgesC 5y ago

Build your own custom and in house CRM that you know from top to bottom, which does precisely what your company needs. And keep it closed in your private network.

amaccuish 5y ago

our company impletemented salesforce because SAP was too expensive. that is all.