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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 co

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?
    - jzoch 5y ago
      they have many many software engineers this guy is lying
    - Jach 5y ago
      As a former employee (and not one acqui-hired) I don't know how you could say they're not a "software company", but I did say something similar during my time that I still stand by which is they're not really a "tech company" in the way Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon/Google/Apple are. They do have a few thousands of in-house devs working on "core" products, and lots of other devs from various large acquisitions (e.g. Heroku) mostly separated from that, there's a good deal of tech and some smart engineers, but I'd still call them a marketing or sales company instead. This distinction is mostly only relevant to programmers in that it describes and predicts an internal mindset for how problems are approached and how budgets are allocated. It's hard to describe without examples I don't really want to get in to, but as an illustration you could make an axis with one end being clearly a tech company like Facebook and the other being not a tech company like Walmart (despite Walmart having some impressive tech/smart engineers). Salesforce sits quite a bit further away from the tech end than people think.
  - tinyhouse 5y ago
    @jjeaff Of course they do development. They have software engineers and buy real software companies with software engineers. Someone needs to maintain all the software they keep integrating into their eco-system (some products which they acquire remain independent). But their business model is to expand by buying or investing in other companies. They don't invest in building new stuff in house. Partly because they don't really have the capabilities to build something like Slack for example that would dominate the market.
altacc 5y ago
Salesforce do tend to buy a company and then brand that company's products as part of Salesforce. The result is a mess. Want the same data in your marketing cloud than your core? Nope, it's a different database and data model and true syncing of data can be a nightmare. What you're left with is the same as if you'd bought products from 5 different companies and built an integration layer to tie them together. Funnily enough, Salesforce has had to build an data integration platform to help untangle its mess of acquisitions and of course the customer has to pay extra to use it.

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?
  - jzoch 5y ago
    they have many many software engineers this guy is lying
  - Jach 5y ago
    As a former employee (and not one acqui-hired) I don't know how you could say they're not a "software company", but I did say something similar during my time that I still stand by which is they're not really a "tech company" in the way Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon/Google/Apple are. They do have a few thousands of in-house devs working on "core" products, and lots of other devs from various large acquisitions (e.g. Heroku) mostly separated from that, there's a good deal of tech and some smart engineers, but I'd still call them a marketing or sales company instead. This distinction is mostly only relevant to programmers in that it describes and predicts an internal mindset for how problems are approached and how budgets are allocated. It's hard to describe without examples I don't really want to get in to, but as an illustration you could make an axis with one end being clearly a tech company like Facebook and the other being not a tech company like Walmart (despite Walmart having some impressive tech/smart engineers). Salesforce sits quite a bit further away from the tech end than people think.
- tinyhouse 5y ago
  @jjeaff Of course they do development. They have software engineers and buy real software companies with software engineers. Someone needs to maintain all the software they keep integrating into their eco-system (some products which they acquire remain independent). But their business model is to expand by buying or investing in other companies. They don't invest in building new stuff in house. Partly because they don't really have the capabilities to build something like Slack for example that would dominate the market.

altacc 5y ago

Salesforce do tend to buy a company and then brand that company's products as part of Salesforce. The result is a mess. Want the same data in your marketing cloud than your core? Nope, it's a different database and data model and true syncing of data can be a nightmare. What you're left with is the same as if you'd bought products from 5 different companies and built an integration layer to tie them together. Funnily enough, Salesforce has had to build an data integration platform to help untangle its mess of acquisitions and of course the customer has to pay extra to use it.