Trying to change productivity at Salesforce is rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. The truth of the situation is their core product (Basically a layer which allows you to map your business problems onto a relational database + workflow thing) is losing some relevance because the world of tech has moved on, relational databases are not the hotness they were back in the 80s and 90s, people have realised you can model a lot of problems very simply using things like k/v stores etc and they’ve reached a certain level of saturation in their existing customer base. There’s only so many people that need to have the data entry/workflow screens or the reports they generate out of the system, and only so many big enterprises that are going to pay the kind of software license fees that will keep a tech behemoth like that running.<p>Secondly, their business model has attempted to diversify from just being about sales but fundamentally they are long the economy in general. If the economy is struggling, the appetite for “sales enablement” and collaboration-type tooling is going to wither. Some of the products they acquired (Tableau, Slack in particular) are pretty cool but came at a hefty price tag that is going to be tough to recoup as the environment generally gets tougher and their competition (free and paid) increases.<p>I don’t think either engineering or sales productivity is going to solve this and if there’s some magic there I’m pretty skeptical that BCG would find it.
> “From what we know, [Boston Consulting Group] made some significant recommendations on how salespeople and developers should be measured to improve productivity,” Wang told TechCrunch.<p>Huh, so SalesForce, up to this point had, no idea on how to measure if their salespeople or developers were doing anything useful?<p>That seems implausible so I assume this is just about reducing headcount without having to pay the costs of laying people off. Or am I being too cynical?
"Activist investors" are just hedge funds trying to extract as much short term rent from the work of others as possible.<p>That their short term desire for a brief bump in profit regardless of long term cost has an impact on the executive management of the company is more an indictment of the ineffectiveness of that company than anything else. The use of consultants to launder their incompetence is a BS activity - I've never heard of any consultants in these circumstances doing anything other than say that the executives are awesome, and that all the employees have too many rights and need to be put in their place and/or fired, as close to the bounds of legality as possible.
Capitalism only works in theory. While it might sound good in principle, the realities of human nature make it impractical as a way to organize an economic system.