3 ms·

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. co

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.

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.