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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

by adzm 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
  Netsuite is stuck 30 years ago at least. So painful and insanely slow. It’s like having dial up again.
  - mrwnmonm 6y ago
    Which ERP isn't?
    - jonplackett 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
Is it heavy JS load on the client side, or slow processing on server side that causes this sluggishness?
- bigfudge 6y ago
  I think it’s probably both. The api and db querying are dog slow too.
  - dylan604 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.

by adzm 6y ago

vbsteven 6y 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 6y ago
Netsuite is stuck 30 years ago at least. So painful and insanely slow. It’s like having dial up again.
- mrwnmonm 6y ago
  Which ERP isn't?
  - jonplackett 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago

Is it heavy JS load on the client side, or slow processing on server side that causes this sluggishness?

bigfudge 6y ago
I think it’s probably both. The api and db querying are dog slow too.
- dylan604 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.