I understand the appeal of Salesforce, though in my experience it is just as clunky and slow as the software it replaced. I'm sure there are configurations that are not that way, but it's a horrible part of my day to day experience using it as a customer support module. Comments take 4 seconds to add. Opening a case in a new tab is 30 seconds or more. Comments and feeds load progressively, slowly, making it nearly impossible to get to the beginning of long discussions. URLs are long and crazy and have no useful info or anything cool in them. We've had Salesforce consultants and experts come in and gain a second or two here or there but it's been an awful experience over the last 5 years.
This is a good article and history is Salesforce. Another shorter developer focused perspective: Salesforce is a relational database editor. You can create tables, columns, and relationships, app in a nice UI without writing code. You get automatic views and edit forms for records in the tables. And the whole thing is built on a platform where you can write custom sandboxed code to manipulate those records, or expose them over APIs to external systems.<p>The platform is both powerful and pretty clunky. Salesforce development is consistently 20 years behind established best practices. Learning Salesforce means learning the thousands of limitations and broken parts of the ecosystem. And it’s non transferable knowledge.
Salesforce is amazing, in the sense that it truly lives up to its name. Everytime I've been hired into an executive role I've cancelled our Salesforce subscription and productivity has gone up.<p>Its clunky, slow and overly complex if you ask me. But their success cannot be denied, thus they must have an amazing salesforce.
I've used Salesforce at every company I've worked at for the last 8 years. Here are my observations:<p>- There is a special place in hell for the person who made the decision to have leads and contacts as separate objects. It creates all kinds of complexity. Some may have a need to work with leads but for clean reporting, you almost have to dump leads. Most B2B companies I know don't use the lead object and autoconvert everything to Contacts. But it has always seemed like a bad decision to have both.<p>- There is a long line of companies that have tried and are trying to disrupt Salesforce - none have succeed and my take is that this is because of the ecosystem and app exchange. That makes it very challenging to overcome.<p>- Salesforce has made improvements in their interface (Lightning is, by most counts, an improvement), but an entire industries exists to make up for the shortcomings of Salesforce. Sending emails directly or programmatically is pain, so we have Outreach and Salesloft. Entering data is too slow - so there's Dooly. Their marketing reporting stinks - so there is Fullcircle and Bizible. They own Pardot, yet somehow still can't top Marketo, Hubspot or Eloqua - which is a pretty amazing fail imho. And the Pardot integration really doesn't add a ton of value over other solutions. But as noted above, this weakness is also a strength because you've got a huge ecosystem.<p>If I'm starting a company right now, I'd probably go with Hubspot because there is just enormous power in the simplicity of having all of the data for both marketing and sales in a single system. Not that Hubspot doesn't have it's own issues, but reporting has always been a huge problem at every company so if I can't avoid this pain even a little, I'd consider it a big win.
I really enjoy these articles. I don't know a ton about Retool, but I know these articles are often written by or in the style of their Growth analyst, Justin Gage (<a href="https://randomshit.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://randomshit.dev/</a>) who seems to be fantastic at writing articles about what these are and how they work in his own right.<p>These types of posts are a refreshing change from what company blogs have become (or maybe always were?): garbage vendor content pushing their agenda.<p>I understand how Retool could be used to do some really cool stuff on top of Salesforce, but this post is also just an informative expose of an industry giant.<p>Justin recently did another one about Accenture, whom I worked for a while back, and really appreciate the story that is being told.<p>Kudos for these fantastic posts. I look forward to reading these every time i see reool.com pop up.
Salesforce is a master work of lock-in-as-a-product (LIAAP). The best part is that it’s not even a good or original product. It’s success lies in the company’s ability to sell a mega package of trivial CRM systems to non-technical sales people. It may eventually wear thin but it’s target demographic is spectacularly niche and self-consuming that there’s little need to disrupt it.<p>And while sales people tell other sales people they need Salesforce in order to not maintain a software stack of their own. Those same other sales people turn around and tell developers to maintain integration with the Salesforce APIs.
I'm a pretty new Salesforce admin, and so far it has been a horrible experience. Apart from its horribly sluggish user experience, developing for it as also very frustrating.<p>You can't restore backups! You can export your data, but there's no way to import it, because you can't set the object Id or autonumbered fields (like the case number, which gets communicated to the customer). They used to provide an extremely expensive recovery service, but they stopped doing that. That's just unbelievable for a business product.<p>I also can't count how many times I looked up an issue and found an "Ideas" post that's over ten years old, with 10k upvotes and no reaction from Salesforce at all. Id doesn't seem like they work on the core product anymore, they just release new things that you need a license for.
My company had 3 instances at one point after acquisitions. Two of them got merged so we’re stuck with two because of the number of customizations and the different sales approaches / teams between the two divisions.<p>One of them upgraded to lightning required by some feature. The experience nice with lightning (even slower) has been worse than classic. Meanwhile the other instance is till on classic.<p>We made the mistake of embedding business logic into sales force and integrated with their API only later to find out it can take upwards of a minute to just convert a lead to a contact via API depending on the current load on the system.<p>Enterprise systems are fun.
Previous discussion in 2019 with 234 comments <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277115" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277115</a>
I have been working on the Salesforce platform for about 3 years now, and it has been a pretty enlightening experience(good and bad). It has certainly been lucrative as well. I would say that a lot of the issues around Salesforce stem from how easy it is to write or configure a terrible solution. Something that looks like it works but is so far from any sort of optimization.<p>Much of Salesforce implementation development also goes unvetted by the client. I have worked and currently work on projects where I constantly ask 'how did this ever make it into production...and how has no one noticed that this is hot garbage for 4 years'. Eventually someone digs deep enough and whoever is managing that project at the time gets the brunt of the blame unfortunately...
The trouble with Salesforce is that it’s turned into the very thing they set out to replace. It’s big, unwieldy, clunky, and frustrating to use.<p>It’s “SaaS” which was an upgrade on what they replaced initially, but seems like they’re increasingly the ones bound to be “disrupted.”
Salesforce is a full business app development platform with almost unmatched flexibility, fully hosted and programmable. CRM doesn’t really begin to cover it.<p>This reads like I’m a zealot. I’m not. But there is nothing that I’ve seen that can do what it can do and, if you know how it works, you can leverage it for incredible time and efficiency savings for developing and deploying business apps.
My company had a lot of data in SAP and also a lot of data in Salesforce (don't ask me how they decided what to put where). Sometimes we need data from one or the other for projects and so far it was always that getting SAP data was extremely tedious to impossible while getting Salesforce data is usually pretty straightforward. I am not sure if that's caused by the teams that manage the systems but it's definitely very notiecable.
I'm just waiting for Salesforce to be disrupted. It has become so large and all encompassing that it is hard to get into for the lower end. Seems like a ripe area for a low end competitor but I haven't seen anything great yet.
Act! back in the 90's right around the time Symantec bought them. Seemed to be just about perfect for what most small businesses would need. Out of nostalgia I did some searching and the amount of times it changed hands and what they are charging (per month!) for it now I can only imagine - it's probably as heavyweight or more so than SalesForce.<p>Salesforce just has a weird flow. I think I have the gist of it, but man do you have to use it for quite a while before it starts to make sense - all while you wait and wait and wait for anything to happen after you submit something. Ugh.
The most interesting thing in this post was that Mark worked for Apple in 1984 and stayed in good terms with Jobs long enough so that he was still Benioff’s mentor in the 2000s before Jobs died
Retool also had a great post in the past demystifying what SAP is: <a href="https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/" rel="nofollow">https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/</a><p>It’s amazing content in an otherwise opaque category of enterprise software and services, which are so strongly embedded in part because no one knows what they do and how they’re used in practice.
Salesforce is uniquely amazing in that its development and extension environment is extremely close to the dreams of Smalltalk developers and the like. Loads of extensibility and introspection possible on basically every view of your system.<p>Yeah it’s slow but honestly you’re spending most of your time looking at the data and writing it up, the slowness doesn’t matter that much in the long run imo.
I'm conflicted on Salesforce.<p>As a user I am firmly in the camp that believes it is garbage to use and overpriced.<p>As a developer and contractor it paid for my first home.
"So he gave Salesforce simple subscription pricing that scaled according to usage. In 1999, it was $50/user per month. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) was born."
I would say that the Bloomberg terminal was an earlier example of a SaaS.
Where I work, we are planning to ditch our very expensive web portals and mobile apps to go all-in with Salesforce. We plan to build several Salesforce lightning communities to be used as our front-end portals. Salesforce will convert these communities to mobile apps as part of our contract. Along with the base Salesforce org, we have Marketo (marketing), Service Cloud (customer support), Financial Force (ERP), Tableau (BI), Tableau CRM/Einstein Analytics (analytics), B2B, and Mulesoft. The only products I question are Financial Force, B2B, and Mulesoft as they are very expensive for what you get.
Salesforce is this generation's Lotus Notes.<p>It's incredibly powerful software that when implemented well, can streamline processes, provide easy access to information, and make teams really efficient.<p>However, it rarely seems to be implemented well.
Workday is also a CRUD app-builder, but for HR professionals.<p>What other typical company functions have this sort of provider?<p>Conversely, what other company functions need this sort of provider?
I've done quite a bit of Salesforce development in my career. First as a full-time employee at the start of my career, and later on as part-time side gigs. There are a lot of negative comments here about Salesforce, and they are mostly all valid. Salesforce is not the least bit sexy, and can often be frustrating for both developers and users. There are a couple of good things about it that I wanted to share though:<p>* A single developer can be incredibly productive at automating a company's business processes. Fresh out of college at my first job I was the only developer supporting hundreds of daily users across our sales, customer support, operations, and finance departments - most of whom were basically working out of Salesforce full-time. Salesforce also proved really adaptable for supporting all of the crazy sales campaigns or operations initiatives that management could dream up - often with quick turnaround times. For me there is no question that the Saleforce licensing costs (or some other low-code alternative) are worthwhile for most businesses vs. trying to build internal systems from scratch.<p>* Developers are in high demand, and I have received lots of requests from former colleagues looking for a Salesforce developer - even a decade after I moved away from full-time Salesforce development. When I have accepted these offers I've literally been told I can charge however much I want (although I do tend to keep it reasonable).<p>* You tend to have much more direct contact with your users than in other B2B or B2C development roles. And users are often super-appreciative of even simple changes. It really is a great feeling to see the difference that your work makes firsthand, and I have had some great working relationships with sales and support managers over the years.<p>* The core Salesforce platform (forms and data modeling, workflow, API integration, etc.) is actually an incredible piece of product design and engineering in my opinion. I know it's getting long in the tooth these days, but the team that built all of that deserves credit for getting so much of it right. All the stuff that Salesforce has built or acquired since then, unfortunately, has been much less impressive.<p>* Salesforce is expensive for sure, but not as bad as the pricing on their website would suggest. Apparently nobody pays the list price for Salesforce licenses, and a 50% discount from the list prices is not uncommon in my experience.<p>Ultimately I am glad I decided to get out of Salesforce development if only because the developer experience with almost any other programming language is just so much nicer. But I learned a lot from the experience - and I think those early interactions with users and firsthand experience of how business are run have made me a more well-rounded developer. I was also able to use the skills that I learned while doing Salesforce development to transition into a role building web applications, and pursue a more traditional development career.<p>And now as I am eyeing retirement, I am contemplating getting back into Salesforce consulting on a part-time basis.
As someone who has spent the past several months using Trailhead to learn Salesforce - even picking up some badges for things that seem practical this thread is making me reconsider my choices.<p>Have I wasted my time in learning Salesforce?<p>I know that there is what is effectively a cult following of Salesforce evangelists but I was hoping this would be valuable in the long term.
I'm always amazed at how the simplest solutions have the biggest impact on business users.<p>Us devs often try to invent groundbreaking software, while all they needed was to automate a rollodex...
Build your own custom and in house CRM that you know from top to bottom, which does precisely what your company needs. And keep it closed in your private network.
The site has a CSS issue that prevents the "Retool" logo to be clicked on mobile. If someone from Retool reads this, it's related to ".site-header::after" having an absolute positionning AFAICT.
"Salesforce’s point-and-click database editor and drag-and-drop UI builder alone make it much more than a CRM. But when you bolt on other apps and 3rd-party APIs, it gets close to programming without code: a new way to build software."<p>Seems analogous to Wordpress for building websites, without actually knowing how to build websites, yes/no?
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.<p>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.