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Salesforce has spent an insane amount of money on real estate. I think the return to the office has nothing to do with productivity or even management style and

Salesforce has spent an insane amount of money on real estate. I think the return to the office has nothing to do with productivity or even management style and everything to do with the big towers with SalesForce on top. The irony in this is that Salesforce literally set sales free from the office back in the late 90s and early 00s. When 9/11 hit, I didn't miss a beat: I did presentations with WebEx (we did the voice part with a conference call) and logged everything in my through-the-browser CRM at blazing ISDN speeds. But it worked well enough that at least enterprise software sales evolved to a have-laptop-will-travel culture. Slack was a huge part of the work from home revolution of 2020.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
why can’t they sell the buildings/get out of the leases/let them expire/don’t renew them/lease them out to somebody else?
- mike_d 4y ago
  You have a bucket of widgets, and so does everyone else to varying degrees. Each widget is really worth a dollar, but you paid $12 on average for yours because widgets were in demand at the time. Nobody really needs all their widgets right now, so there is little to no demand. You can either keep holding your widgets and keep them at a $12 valuation on your books, or sell them for an $11 write down. If enough people sell their widgets at $1 then everyone's widgets are magically worth $1 too, and everyone is fucked. Bay Area commercial real estate right now is like holding a bunch of jumbo mortgages in 2007.
- indymike 4y ago
  Very few buyers for large amounts of office space right now. Commercial vacancy is high.
- WhyNotHugo 4y ago
  They're trying to push for this "back to the office" mentality. You can't convince other that this is a good idea and then lease out your offices if you're not using your office yourself. I'm not sure about this particular case, but in similar situations with other corporations, a key detail was that management had investments in office real estate, so the push to "back to the office" was more about personal pockets than anything else.
user3939382 4y ago
> Salesforce literally set sales free from the office back in the late 90s According to Wikipedia they only existed for 10 months in the 90s. I don’t remember hearing about them until like 2005. Were they really that well known that early?
- ghaff 4y ago
  Late 90s is too early and without digging in their financials I assume the early 2000s were lean for at least a time. I most associate them with being very vocal about cloud quite early on as SaaS actually appealed to quite a few companies as opposed to application service providers of the dot-com era.
- indymike 4y ago
  I was in the CRM business at the time - VP of sales for a CRM integrator and Salesforce was an earthquake when it hit the market in 99. By 2001, Salesforce and competitor Upshot (which got bought by #1 CRM vendor Siebel and put out of business in a failed attempt to put the web genie back in the bottle) were gaining market quickly and their free/low cost per user/mo made it really hard to compete with using traditional software. I did really well selling the companies that had purchased installed-on-the-hard drive software from me with the new SaaS CRMs.
  - user3939382 4y ago
    Thanks for the perspective. I was a freshman in high school then, my title was friends-and-family-circle computer expert. At the time my CRM knowledge was limited to recommending "Act!". How far we've come: SF https://vni.s3.amazonaws.com/170928161636742.png https://vni.s3.amazonaws.com/170928161636742.png Act https://i.imgur.com/nW3H5TO.png https://i.imgur.com/nW3H5TO.png
    - indymike 4y ago
      Things have improved, for sure.
loloquwowndueo 4y ago
> and logged everything in my through-the-browser CRM at blazing ISDN speeds. Nowadays every single click on sales force takes a painfully long amount of time - sometimes several seconds but it compounds into making it feel like you’re wading through molasses. Salesforce “lightning” has got to be the most ironically-named product in history - it’s a slow, painful clusterfuck which makes me miserable every time I have to use it.
- indymike 4y ago
  It felt that way back then, too, but at least you didn't lose your forecast when you synced with the home office and it went sideways.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

why can’t they sell the buildings/get out of the leases/let them expire/don’t renew them/lease them out to somebody else?

mike_d 4y ago
You have a bucket of widgets, and so does everyone else to varying degrees. Each widget is really worth a dollar, but you paid $12 on average for yours because widgets were in demand at the time. Nobody really needs all their widgets right now, so there is little to no demand. You can either keep holding your widgets and keep them at a $12 valuation on your books, or sell them for an $11 write down. If enough people sell their widgets at $1 then everyone's widgets are magically worth $1 too, and everyone is fucked. Bay Area commercial real estate right now is like holding a bunch of jumbo mortgages in 2007.
indymike 4y ago
Very few buyers for large amounts of office space right now. Commercial vacancy is high.
WhyNotHugo 4y ago
They're trying to push for this "back to the office" mentality. You can't convince other that this is a good idea and then lease out your offices if you're not using your office yourself. I'm not sure about this particular case, but in similar situations with other corporations, a key detail was that management had investments in office real estate, so the push to "back to the office" was more about personal pockets than anything else.

user3939382 4y ago

> Salesforce literally set sales free from the office back in the late 90s According to Wikipedia they only existed for 10 months in the 90s. I don’t remember hearing about them until like 2005. Were they really that well known that early?

ghaff 4y ago
Late 90s is too early and without digging in their financials I assume the early 2000s were lean for at least a time. I most associate them with being very vocal about cloud quite early on as SaaS actually appealed to quite a few companies as opposed to application service providers of the dot-com era.
indymike 4y ago
I was in the CRM business at the time - VP of sales for a CRM integrator and Salesforce was an earthquake when it hit the market in 99. By 2001, Salesforce and competitor Upshot (which got bought by #1 CRM vendor Siebel and put out of business in a failed attempt to put the web genie back in the bottle) were gaining market quickly and their free/low cost per user/mo made it really hard to compete with using traditional software. I did really well selling the companies that had purchased installed-on-the-hard drive software from me with the new SaaS CRMs.
- user3939382 4y ago
  Thanks for the perspective. I was a freshman in high school then, my title was friends-and-family-circle computer expert. At the time my CRM knowledge was limited to recommending "Act!". How far we've come: SF https://vni.s3.amazonaws.com/170928161636742.png https://vni.s3.amazonaws.com/170928161636742.png Act https://i.imgur.com/nW3H5TO.png https://i.imgur.com/nW3H5TO.png
  - indymike 4y ago
    Things have improved, for sure.

loloquwowndueo 4y ago

> and logged everything in my through-the-browser CRM at blazing ISDN speeds. Nowadays every single click on sales force takes a painfully long amount of time - sometimes several seconds but it compounds into making it feel like you’re wading through molasses. Salesforce “lightning” has got to be the most ironically-named product in history - it’s a slow, painful clusterfuck which makes me miserable every time I have to use it.

indymike 4y ago
It felt that way back then, too, but at least you didn't lose your forecast when you synced with the home office and it went sideways.