4 ms·

> To me, Salesforce is the embodiment of the perception that many SAAS companies exist solely to support other SAAS companies, and that they bring little to no

> To me, Salesforce is the embodiment of the perception that many SAAS companies exist solely to support other SAAS companies, and that they bring little to no value to anyone. Make something people want. If they require assistance, have a half-baked API, sell you the kitchen sink, are prohibitively expensive and they are printing money selling sales software they are the definition of making something people want. > it's platform is just not viable for many potential customers It might not be what you want, but let's not lose the forest in the trees. To build a billion dollar company you have to sell a product that is not viable for many potential customers. Not all phones are Apple and not all sales software is Salesforce. The size of a company doesn't allow or disallow it to be lean and mean, just as both a 7' and 5' tall athlete can be lean and mean on the court.

smt88 12y ago
> If they require assistance, have a half-baked API, sell you the kitchen sink, are prohibitively expensive and they are printing money selling sales software they are the definition of making something people want. Life doesn't work in simple axioms like this. You're clearly not familiar with "enterprise software" if you think value = sales. I'd wager that the vast majority of SalesForce users despise it. That means it's delivering less value than something that's efficient and gets out of their way. "SalesForce" is now listed as a skill on resumes, which means it is the opposite of usable! So companies buy it, and you could argue that companies "want" it and get "value" out of it, but sometimes it's still not that rational. SalesForce has great salespeople, and it's a huge company. Sometimes just being the biggest will get you deals because it guarantees you'll be around and can offer enterprise-level support.
- mattmanser 12y ago
  In my experience, I don't think users hate it. In fact, every time I talk to someone about salesforce and go "what, about that interface, huh? How bad is Salesforce!". They look at me like I'm a little loopy. It's basically a lot better than the thing they used to have, which was nothing. And they can use it on their phone. And it hooks up to Outlook. And it does X, Y and Z other useful things that make their life easier. The difference is that you and I can look at Salesforce and realize it's a mess of legacy and outdated interface ideas, that SOQL and Apex really fucking suck, so, so bad. But for users it's better than the Excel spreadsheet that kept getting out of synch, or the painfully clunky google sheet or whatever. I mean, every time I look at salesforce it's a disgrace. Something as simple as basic filtering by related object values on Views is impossible. Or that the Notes hide the note behind a popup instead of showing the note in table view. Or that you can't change the layout of the entity homepages. Or that bizarre news feed interface. And yet they've built a thing which tries to automatically get the twitter or linked in profile. It just screams of bad, bad, here-be-dragons core code which no-one dares touch.

smt88 12y ago

> If they require assistance, have a half-baked API, sell you the kitchen sink, are prohibitively expensive and they are printing money selling sales software they are the definition of making something people want. Life doesn't work in simple axioms like this. You're clearly not familiar with "enterprise software" if you think value = sales. I'd wager that the vast majority of SalesForce users despise it. That means it's delivering less value than something that's efficient and gets out of their way. "SalesForce" is now listed as a skill on resumes, which means it is the opposite of usable! So companies buy it, and you could argue that companies "want" it and get "value" out of it, but sometimes it's still not that rational. SalesForce has great salespeople, and it's a huge company. Sometimes just being the biggest will get you deals because it guarantees you'll be around and can offer enterprise-level support.

mattmanser 12y ago
In my experience, I don't think users hate it. In fact, every time I talk to someone about salesforce and go "what, about that interface, huh? How bad is Salesforce!". They look at me like I'm a little loopy. It's basically a lot better than the thing they used to have, which was nothing. And they can use it on their phone. And it hooks up to Outlook. And it does X, Y and Z other useful things that make their life easier. The difference is that you and I can look at Salesforce and realize it's a mess of legacy and outdated interface ideas, that SOQL and Apex really fucking suck, so, so bad. But for users it's better than the Excel spreadsheet that kept getting out of synch, or the painfully clunky google sheet or whatever. I mean, every time I look at salesforce it's a disgrace. Something as simple as basic filtering by related object values on Views is impossible. Or that the Notes hide the note behind a popup instead of showing the note in table view. Or that you can't change the layout of the entity homepages. Or that bizarre news feed interface. And yet they've built a thing which tries to automatically get the twitter or linked in profile. It just screams of bad, bad, here-be-dragons core code which no-one dares touch.