It's an 'enterprise' thing.<p>What's an enterprise thing?<p>The most simple tasks are unnecessarily complex. Janky and slow UI that is at least 10 years behind in terms of web norms. It uses its own proprietary versions of standard languages like SOQL, APEX, Lightning, Visualforce instead of SQL, Java/Groovy/Kotlin/Scala/etc., Angular/React/Vue/etc., and HTML/CSS. Absurd data and API limitations for the kind of product it purports to be. Confusing terminology and multiple tools that do the same thing. Buggy IDE and REST implementation. Poor and/or convoluted integrations. Eye-watering license costs. So yeah, classic 'enterprise' product.<p>On the plus side, it's not as terrible as most other enterprise CRM solutions that somehow manage to be even worse.
I've been the CTO for a small Salesforce consulting agency for the last 10 years ( most of my time is actually working as an "architect").<p>Salesforce is really just a cloud based database with a UI slapped on top of it (for both administration and end users).<p>- New Tables and Columns can be added via a Web UI without any downtime.<p>- Business processes can be automated using custom "apex code" (a ripoff of java 1.6) and "visual code" workflow engines.<p>- UI/Layouts can be customized via drag and drop editors and a "Web Component" framework (LWC).<p>- The user security model is robust (Record level access, Field level access & record sharing rules)<p>- There is a pretty solid REST API that is updated in realtime to reflect your models.<p>- The entire org configuration is defined as deployable "metadata" (XML).<p>All this makes it extremely easy to model business processes and quickly build business 'apps'.<p>However, building anything of significant complexity becomes extremely expense very quickly. And once you've built critical processes into salesforce, you are forever vendor locked.<p>The Salesforce Account Manager's goal is to raise total subscription cost 7% with every contract renewal, even if your needs have not changed. They can typically accomplish this by offering your free features early on, letting you become dependent on them and then taking them away if you do not pay more.
I thought I was going to learn something.<p>Then I realized, "wait, this is the end and I still don't know what Salesforce is".<p>App stores were mentioned, SaaS, "The Cloud", no-code, all these buzzwords apparently originated with Salesforce, so...what?<p>In retrospect, the bit about "SOQL" reminds me of the "it goes to 11" quote from Spinal Tap.<p>What's SOQL? Well, it's like SQL. Why is it better? Well, it's got one more letter.<p>"Like a database, Salesforce lets you create new tables with custom columns and relationships, complete with data types and constraints."<p>Ahhhh...like SharePoint?<p>"Salesforce’s point-and-click database editor and drag-and-drop UI builder"<p>Aha, like MS Access?<p>"Visualforce, a component-based UI framework that made it easy to build custom interfaces for Salesforce. Its simple markup let developers build UIs"<p>Oh, like HTML?<p>"And this Apex controller code would fetch the list of objects from the organization’s schema"<p>Like Javascript!
Disclaimer: I’m a salesforce employee (though relatively new one)<p>Salesforce (the app), Jira, Peoplesoft, SAP, etc… are all platforms/apps for business that provide you entities, custom fields for those entities, a web interface, reports, and some other things (workflows). They are really just all moving towards being generic app platforms but in almost cases also provide you with a default app/workflows/entities.<p>How they implement these platforms, how people develop for them, how they integrate into other products, how much admins you need to run them, what kinds of DR and security they provide, how much code is necessary, payment models, etc.. that is the big differentiator in all of those platforms - and there really is huge differences in all of
those.<p>Salesforce the company is bigger than the app, just as Oracle and Atlassian also are.
Salesforce is a major B2B SaaS company. It’s primary product is an enterprise grade CRM called “Service Cloud” that helps sales companies manage the sales motion journey. It is the de facto standard of CRMs. The success of Service Cloud lead to an expansion that now includes tons of enterprise products that integrate with Service Cloud. Some of their other services are:<p>Commerce Cloud: Think enterprise grade Shopify. Competes with Oracle Commerce Cloud.<p>Marketing Cloud: Enterprise grade email service provider.<p>Customer 360: If you use multiple Salesforce products, you can connect all your customer data together with no integration code in one product.<p>A perfect client for Salesforce is an e-commerce retail company who’s differentiator is not technology. Casper (mattress company) is a perfect example. They can buy all this technology and avoid hiring a big team of software engineers. Instead they get all the features they need and can hire much cheaper Salesforce Admins / Developers that can easily be offshored.<p>I have worked with Salesforce for the past 6 years. I was the VP of Engineering at Casper that worked to replace a lot of open source/ customer tech with Salesforce products. A big advantage of this is easier SOX compliance and data security when going though an IPO.
The way I think about salesforce as a developer is it’s essentially a big relational database with a bunch of CRUD guis for all the objects and a built in state machine thing which can model various business processes. Then there are bells and whistles such as reports etc built on top of that and a myriad of “partners”, providers, consultants etc who will sell you prepackaged or custom solutions to make salesforce do whatever you want/need it to do for your industry or business.<p>In building that out it has its own somewhat idiosyncratic ecosystem of custom language(s) and technologies for creating the objects/workflows/relationships/reports etc and for doing the actual admin side, releasing new packages, doing upgrades and so on.
It’s the profitable arm of the Chirch of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, engineered from their world-class genealogy undertaking (and posthumous conversion - just ask the Hebrew’s about that) which serves a useful commercial function and has been able to make a dominant market position through training its evangelists and sales team in the most rigorous environment possible - door to door religious witnessing.<p>It’s also helped by a relatively unspoken network of people with a significant private affiliation that go out of their way to give contracts and money first and foremost to other people of that affiliation. It’s the kind of teamwork that starts young, usually defrauding the welfare system. Or not telling the local investigators why your Mom is only 13 years older than you.