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This is a good article and history is Salesforce. Another shorter developer focused perspective: Salesforce is a relational database editor. You can create tabl

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.
      - edoceo 5y ago
        Yuck. Hubspot is the "CRM" all my sales people hate (they currently like Pipe...something). also, "advice" from a new, shill, throwaway account? pass.
        hubspotthrow 5y ago
        Well I was specifically responding to someone who couldn't find a salesforce replacement because they all wanted to manage the back office. So it seemed relevant rather than shilling in my eyes. Sorry to hear your team dislikes Hubspot.
        clairity 5y ago
        from gp: > "...they currently like Pipe...something" probably pipedrive. it's pretty good for small sales (and some marketing) groups to manage their pipelines. easy to get up and running and fairly flexible for what it is. it's not going to replace salesforce though. hubspot is a mid-market marketing automation product, sitting between little pipedrive and huge salesforce. it's also pretty decent for what it is, helping medium-size marketing (and some sales) departments coordinate across various channels. it also won't replace salesforce, but is appropriate for a mid-tier company (maybe ~$20-200MM in revenue). salesforce is a huge sales channel management platform with at least a couple marketing automation products bolted onto it, along with all sorts of other semi-related stuff, like SCM (supply chain mgmt). this is because they want to own the totality of "marketing", which encompasses all of product, price, promotion, and distribution. (i've done some consulting in this area and have helped clients pick and set up these things)
        hubspotthrow 5y ago
        Note that the person I originally responded to (hopefully helpfully) is different than the person who took offense.
- mrlatinos 5y ago
  That's already happening, and it's causing further fragmentation, so now companies are investing in "IPaaS" tools to merge their data. Which creates even more non-transferable knowledge. It seems customer and marketing data is a mess because marketers will invest in every shiny new tool that promises "actionable insights" from a mountain of data. As terrible as Salesforce may be, it's not as bad as Salesforce + Segment + Informatica + Looker + Lotame + etc.... But that's the world digital advertising has created. Anything for an extra click.
  - lumost 5y ago
    Each extra tool provides a date for a date when marketing will be useful. As a pm I was told that we couldn’t advertise because our marketing integration wasn’t done. A CMO can go from shop to shop delivering nothing but broken ad tech integrations with the job of fixing the mess from the last person.
- penciltwirler 5y ago
  I think Zendesk has taken over the CRM part of Salesforce.
  - mrwnmonm 5y ago
    Man, I would use Zendesk just because they have better UI, SF UI is very crowded.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  I was pretty sure Firebase was in a position to kill Salesforce’s platform, but I guess they never sold it as business platform (plus Google wood never be able to execute human Sales and Support at Salesforce scale)
ghaff 5y ago
Pre-pandemic, Dreamforce--which is basically Salesforce's user and partner show was one of the largest trade shows in the tech industry. I think they were up to about 120,000 attendees or something like that because a huge amount of work goes into customizing Salesforce for a specific business.
- alex_anglin 5y ago
  On the other hand, ERPs and associated systems tend to involve a huge amount of work too.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Sure. And Oracle World and Sapphire are big shows too.
    - daltoy 5y ago
      What are you basing your statement on? It is bigger than AWS at least in 2019 ""Sep. 13, 2019 Updated: Sep. 13, 2019 10:29 p.m. Oracle OpenWorld, a tech conference with some 60,000 attendees" https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-warns-of-Oracle-OpenWorld-14439065.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-wa... "...From December 2 to December 6, we expect more than 60,000 attendees will spread out across six venues on the Las Vegas Strip, promising to make re:Invent 2019 the biggest re:Invent yet..." AWS re:Invent 2019 "...Well, here we are: a little over a week after Salesforce’s 17th Dreamforce. As a lush green forest burgeoned in downtown San Francisco, over 171,000 people from 120+ countries around the globe came together to have the time of their lives with fellow Trailblazers, learn how to help their customers succeed, and promote equality, sustainability, and trust — in short, to transform their businesses and the world we share..." https://www.salesforce.com/blog/dreamforce-2019-infographic/ https://www.salesforce.com/blog/dreamforce-2019-infographic/
spamalot159 5y ago
AirTable is also a relational database editor with a nice UI. I don't know if you could compare the two though.
- brd529 5y ago
  You can. Airtable is what salesforce would look like if it were built today. Because CRM is so dominated by salesforce though, Airtable's defaults are not CRM and it doesn't market itself as such.
  - te_chris 5y ago
    Airtable isn’t even close to what SF can do.
stevekemp 5y ago
It always puts me in mind of Lotus Notes, another "no-code" system which users locked themselves into.
- spiralx 5y ago
  God that was a horrible piece of software, and a terrible email client. http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/lotus.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/lotus.htm
  - dagw 5y ago
    I got my start doing Lotus/Domino development and it was a surprisingly powerful system. We developed all kinds of internal workflow and document management tools that ran basically the entire company. The document store 'database' model it used reminds me very of the NoSQL movement that came over a decade later. One pretty amazing thing at the time (mid-late 90s) was that you also got usable web interface to all your tools almost 'for free' (which is what half the people used). When combined with Lotus 123 it would spit out very nice reports and graphs with only a few lines of code. In many ways it was way ahead of its time and it took years for most other tools to catch up. One thing we never used Lotus for though was mail, calendar or contacts.
    - spiralx 5y ago
      One place I worked at had something similar as well, it's just that all my memories are of using it for mail, calendar and contacts. And the stupid log-in dialog!
ansgri 5y ago
How’s that really different from MS Access?
- brd529 5y ago
  It's not unreasonable to say Salesforce was MS Access / Filemaker in the cloud, and the cloud made all the difference.
- collyw 5y ago
  MS Access was far more pleasant to use. I haven't used it in years and I still haven't seen anything that will give you a relational database and front end with as little effort.
nitwit005 5y ago
A lot of the value is the access control part of that. You can set up a role hierarchy and/or groups and only see the records you're supposed to have access to when you query. Plus configuration of what fields different user types have access to. The downside of that is it means every query, no matter how simple, is a join against multiple internal tables to enforce those rules.
unixhero 5y ago
I want to add. Not 100% non transferrable. I was able to deliver a project on Service Now without any Service Now training, using my Salesforce architecture background.
- bmiller2 5y ago
  Service Now is the bane of my existence. Pray tell if the behind-the-scenes code base is as bad as the experience.
  - unixhero 5y ago
    Strategize & run and or Implement & run NEVER OPERATE this is obvious, everybody knows this :)
delusional 5y ago
So it's Django?
- acidburnNSA 5y ago
  To use Django like this you need'd at least a handful of Django devs writing the models, frontend views, and api views as code.
  - adwww 5y ago
    Sounds cheaper than a SF license + consultant tbh.
    - bigfudge 5y ago
      You would likely get something faster and nicer to use too, but you can’t just do it once ... you need to keep moving because otherwise the team shrinks and you lose the expertise to make even smaller changes. That stagnation is what kills a lot of custom systems.
- collyw 5y ago
  No. I had to integrate a Django based booking system with Saleforce. Django is a pleasure to use as a developer (once you understand it). Salesforce is absolutely terrible, clunky API and just a horrendous developer experience.
dzhiurgis 5y ago
I’ll sprinkle that Salesforce employees have a huge pledge not to break your software as they update it 3 times a year. On flip side, meticulous saving of cpu and memory means your solutions are super constrained. You need to do all sort of tricks like 90s game programmer and still can run yourself into corner on larger systems. Back end is supremely unevolved - their serverless functions have been in beta forever and apex is like 20 years old Java.
amaccuish 5y ago
It's Microsoft Access for the web.

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.
    - edoceo 5y ago
      Yuck. Hubspot is the "CRM" all my sales people hate (they currently like Pipe...something). also, "advice" from a new, shill, throwaway account? pass.
      - hubspotthrow 5y ago
        Well I was specifically responding to someone who couldn't find a salesforce replacement because they all wanted to manage the back office. So it seemed relevant rather than shilling in my eyes. Sorry to hear your team dislikes Hubspot.
        clairity 5y ago
        from gp: > "...they currently like Pipe...something" probably pipedrive. it's pretty good for small sales (and some marketing) groups to manage their pipelines. easy to get up and running and fairly flexible for what it is. it's not going to replace salesforce though. hubspot is a mid-market marketing automation product, sitting between little pipedrive and huge salesforce. it's also pretty decent for what it is, helping medium-size marketing (and some sales) departments coordinate across various channels. it also won't replace salesforce, but is appropriate for a mid-tier company (maybe ~$20-200MM in revenue). salesforce is a huge sales channel management platform with at least a couple marketing automation products bolted onto it, along with all sorts of other semi-related stuff, like SCM (supply chain mgmt). this is because they want to own the totality of "marketing", which encompasses all of product, price, promotion, and distribution. (i've done some consulting in this area and have helped clients pick and set up these things)
        hubspotthrow 5y ago
        Note that the person I originally responded to (hopefully helpfully) is different than the person who took offense.
mrlatinos 5y ago
That's already happening, and it's causing further fragmentation, so now companies are investing in "IPaaS" tools to merge their data. Which creates even more non-transferable knowledge. It seems customer and marketing data is a mess because marketers will invest in every shiny new tool that promises "actionable insights" from a mountain of data. As terrible as Salesforce may be, it's not as bad as Salesforce + Segment + Informatica + Looker + Lotame + etc.... But that's the world digital advertising has created. Anything for an extra click.
- lumost 5y ago
  Each extra tool provides a date for a date when marketing will be useful. As a pm I was told that we couldn’t advertise because our marketing integration wasn’t done. A CMO can go from shop to shop delivering nothing but broken ad tech integrations with the job of fixing the mess from the last person.
penciltwirler 5y ago
I think Zendesk has taken over the CRM part of Salesforce.
- mrwnmonm 5y ago
  Man, I would use Zendesk just because they have better UI, SF UI is very crowded.
dzhiurgis 5y ago
I was pretty sure Firebase was in a position to kill Salesforce’s platform, but I guess they never sold it as business platform (plus Google wood never be able to execute human Sales and Support at Salesforce scale)

ghaff 5y ago

Pre-pandemic, Dreamforce--which is basically Salesforce's user and partner show was one of the largest trade shows in the tech industry. I think they were up to about 120,000 attendees or something like that because a huge amount of work goes into customizing Salesforce for a specific business.

alex_anglin 5y ago
On the other hand, ERPs and associated systems tend to involve a huge amount of work too.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Sure. And Oracle World and Sapphire are big shows too.
  - daltoy 5y ago
    What are you basing your statement on? It is bigger than AWS at least in 2019 ""Sep. 13, 2019 Updated: Sep. 13, 2019 10:29 p.m. Oracle OpenWorld, a tech conference with some 60,000 attendees" https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-warns-of-Oracle-OpenWorld-14439065.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-wa... "...From December 2 to December 6, we expect more than 60,000 attendees will spread out across six venues on the Las Vegas Strip, promising to make re:Invent 2019 the biggest re:Invent yet..." AWS re:Invent 2019 "...Well, here we are: a little over a week after Salesforce’s 17th Dreamforce. As a lush green forest burgeoned in downtown San Francisco, over 171,000 people from 120+ countries around the globe came together to have the time of their lives with fellow Trailblazers, learn how to help their customers succeed, and promote equality, sustainability, and trust — in short, to transform their businesses and the world we share..." https://www.salesforce.com/blog/dreamforce-2019-infographic/ https://www.salesforce.com/blog/dreamforce-2019-infographic/

spamalot159 5y ago

AirTable is also a relational database editor with a nice UI. I don't know if you could compare the two though.

brd529 5y ago
You can. Airtable is what salesforce would look like if it were built today. Because CRM is so dominated by salesforce though, Airtable's defaults are not CRM and it doesn't market itself as such.
- te_chris 5y ago
  Airtable isn’t even close to what SF can do.

stevekemp 5y ago

It always puts me in mind of Lotus Notes, another "no-code" system which users locked themselves into.

spiralx 5y ago
God that was a horrible piece of software, and a terrible email client. http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/lotus.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/lotus.htm
- dagw 5y ago
  I got my start doing Lotus/Domino development and it was a surprisingly powerful system. We developed all kinds of internal workflow and document management tools that ran basically the entire company. The document store 'database' model it used reminds me very of the NoSQL movement that came over a decade later. One pretty amazing thing at the time (mid-late 90s) was that you also got usable web interface to all your tools almost 'for free' (which is what half the people used). When combined with Lotus 123 it would spit out very nice reports and graphs with only a few lines of code. In many ways it was way ahead of its time and it took years for most other tools to catch up. One thing we never used Lotus for though was mail, calendar or contacts.
  - spiralx 5y ago
    One place I worked at had something similar as well, it's just that all my memories are of using it for mail, calendar and contacts. And the stupid log-in dialog!

ansgri 5y ago

How’s that really different from MS Access?

brd529 5y ago
It's not unreasonable to say Salesforce was MS Access / Filemaker in the cloud, and the cloud made all the difference.
collyw 5y ago
MS Access was far more pleasant to use. I haven't used it in years and I still haven't seen anything that will give you a relational database and front end with as little effort.

nitwit005 5y ago

A lot of the value is the access control part of that. You can set up a role hierarchy and/or groups and only see the records you're supposed to have access to when you query. Plus configuration of what fields different user types have access to. The downside of that is it means every query, no matter how simple, is a join against multiple internal tables to enforce those rules.

unixhero 5y ago

I want to add. Not 100% non transferrable. I was able to deliver a project on Service Now without any Service Now training, using my Salesforce architecture background.

bmiller2 5y ago
Service Now is the bane of my existence. Pray tell if the behind-the-scenes code base is as bad as the experience.
- unixhero 5y ago
  Strategize & run and or Implement & run NEVER OPERATE this is obvious, everybody knows this :)

delusional 5y ago

So it's Django?

acidburnNSA 5y ago
To use Django like this you need'd at least a handful of Django devs writing the models, frontend views, and api views as code.
- adwww 5y ago
  Sounds cheaper than a SF license + consultant tbh.
  - bigfudge 5y ago
    You would likely get something faster and nicer to use too, but you can’t just do it once ... you need to keep moving because otherwise the team shrinks and you lose the expertise to make even smaller changes. That stagnation is what kills a lot of custom systems.
collyw 5y ago
No. I had to integrate a Django based booking system with Saleforce. Django is a pleasure to use as a developer (once you understand it). Salesforce is absolutely terrible, clunky API and just a horrendous developer experience.

dzhiurgis 5y ago

I’ll sprinkle that Salesforce employees have a huge pledge not to break your software as they update it 3 times a year. On flip side, meticulous saving of cpu and memory means your solutions are super constrained. You need to do all sort of tricks like 90s game programmer and still can run yourself into corner on larger systems. Back end is supremely unevolved - their serverless functions have been in beta forever and apex is like 20 years old Java.

amaccuish 5y ago

It's Microsoft Access for the web.