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The Salesforce-arati are out in force, I see. I don't know the context of this story, but I also know you don't make it to CTO of Salesforce by burning a few br

The Salesforce-arati are out in force, I see. I don't know the context of this story, but I also know you don't make it to CTO of Salesforce by burning a few bridges. Generally, Salesforce has excellent marketing, but technically it has fallen behind in a few areas. It seems the advertising in question was creative in its language at least. I am sure it is legally all watertight though. It makes one wonder why this VP complained about this? It is not uncommon in larger organisations to oversell certain product features.

tootie 3y ago
I'm a veteran of terrible enterprise software and Salesforce is mostly not terrible. It's overweight, complex and expensive, but it's also powerful, customizable and interoperable in all the ways you need it to be. The main value to me is that if you look at any remotely related software like automation, data integration, billing, reporting they all have a native Salesforce integration as their first listed feature. That's incumbency and clout moreso than a technical vote of confidence, but it still matters to CTOs. I'll say that nearly all their acquired products I've worked with kinda suck and barely integrate in any meaningful way (I'm thinking Tableau and Marketing Cloud especially).
- sleazebreeze 3y ago
  > I'll say that nearly all their acquired products I've worked with kinda suck and barely integrate in any meaningful way (I'm thinking Tableau and Marketing Cloud especially). I worked for Tableau before the acquisition and left a year or two after. It was pretty clear to insiders that there was never a good path to a smooth integration of Tableau into the SF platform. The teams have wasted years on that and are still struggling. There is a massive amount of actual tech debt on the Tableau monolith side that just can't be overcome without huge investment. Tableau spent years trying to fix that and couldn't make a dent, SF brought an even more short-sighted planning process in and only made it worse. Granted that Tableau could never fully commit to the efforts and the highest level of executives were only interested in making Tableau an attractive acquisition target. Exception being Francois, who still seems to care about Tableau the product.
- oxfordmale 3y ago
  Storage in Salesforce is super expensive. And as you said any of their acquired products barely integrate with Salesforce. Salesforce success is reliant on lack of serious competition. Beyond that it is decades behind modern software engineering practices. Do you seriously need a third party tool to back up the data in a SaaS application? Astonishing!
  - tootie 3y ago
    Storage cost is nuts. They announced a migration to AWS that is going to start rolling out. I'm not sure if that's going to let us utilize cloud native storage.
cavisne 3y ago
Probably a power struggle with another VP. VP's could care less about if a product works or not, but a common thing in FAANG is to propose a big change, do nothing, but convince everyone the project has been launched. My guess is he was trying to call out another team for doing this, to bring headcount/priorities back to himself.
to11mtm 3y ago
> Generally, Salesforce has excellent marketing, but technically it has fallen behind in a few areas. I have on more than one occasion quipped that 'Salesforce' actually refers to their own marketing team rather than the software. > It seems the advertising in question was creative in its language at least. I am sure it is legally all watertight though. > It makes one wonder why this VP complained about this? It is not uncommon in larger organisations to oversell certain product features. I'll bite; if any of this 'data' not being processed immediately is related to E-mail or SMS message consent (the article mentions Marketing Cloud, which can do texting,) there is a risk of messages getting sent out when a user has opted out. IF (big if) that is the case, there is a risk of hurting end-customer goodwill, or in the case of SMS messages, end-customer filing a lawsuit against Salesforce's customer.

tootie 3y ago

I'm a veteran of terrible enterprise software and Salesforce is mostly not terrible. It's overweight, complex and expensive, but it's also powerful, customizable and interoperable in all the ways you need it to be. The main value to me is that if you look at any remotely related software like automation, data integration, billing, reporting they all have a native Salesforce integration as their first listed feature. That's incumbency and clout moreso than a technical vote of confidence, but it still matters to CTOs. I'll say that nearly all their acquired products I've worked with kinda suck and barely integrate in any meaningful way (I'm thinking Tableau and Marketing Cloud especially).

sleazebreeze 3y ago
> I'll say that nearly all their acquired products I've worked with kinda suck and barely integrate in any meaningful way (I'm thinking Tableau and Marketing Cloud especially). I worked for Tableau before the acquisition and left a year or two after. It was pretty clear to insiders that there was never a good path to a smooth integration of Tableau into the SF platform. The teams have wasted years on that and are still struggling. There is a massive amount of actual tech debt on the Tableau monolith side that just can't be overcome without huge investment. Tableau spent years trying to fix that and couldn't make a dent, SF brought an even more short-sighted planning process in and only made it worse. Granted that Tableau could never fully commit to the efforts and the highest level of executives were only interested in making Tableau an attractive acquisition target. Exception being Francois, who still seems to care about Tableau the product.
oxfordmale 3y ago
Storage in Salesforce is super expensive. And as you said any of their acquired products barely integrate with Salesforce. Salesforce success is reliant on lack of serious competition. Beyond that it is decades behind modern software engineering practices. Do you seriously need a third party tool to back up the data in a SaaS application? Astonishing!
- tootie 3y ago
  Storage cost is nuts. They announced a migration to AWS that is going to start rolling out. I'm not sure if that's going to let us utilize cloud native storage.

cavisne 3y ago

Probably a power struggle with another VP. VP's could care less about if a product works or not, but a common thing in FAANG is to propose a big change, do nothing, but convince everyone the project has been launched. My guess is he was trying to call out another team for doing this, to bring headcount/priorities back to himself.

to11mtm 3y ago

> Generally, Salesforce has excellent marketing, but technically it has fallen behind in a few areas. I have on more than one occasion quipped that 'Salesforce' actually refers to their own marketing team rather than the software. > It seems the advertising in question was creative in its language at least. I am sure it is legally all watertight though. > It makes one wonder why this VP complained about this? It is not uncommon in larger organisations to oversell certain product features. I'll bite; if any of this 'data' not being processed immediately is related to E-mail or SMS message consent (the article mentions Marketing Cloud, which can do texting,) there is a risk of messages getting sent out when a user has opted out. IF (big if) that is the case, there is a risk of hurting end-customer goodwill, or in the case of SMS messages, end-customer filing a lawsuit against Salesforce's customer.