[tootie]

I was in the same boat and finally did an implementation just recently. Salesforce is a crazy beast. At it's heart is really just a CRM. A tool for tracking and nurturing customer relationships. Different businesses have very different kinds of relationships with customers if you're like a giant retailer vs something like selling industrial equipment to manufacturers so making a tool to cover all those cases is hard. Salesforce to me really feels like a UI-on-a-database kinda tool surrounded by a load of data manipulation tools. It's also rife with DSLs (Apex, derived from Java and two custom flavors of SQL). The big thing about Salesforce is just how big it is. It integrates with everything, they have a robust app marketplace and dozens of integration partners, they've acquired loads of complementary software companies like Exact Target, Tableau, Mulesoft and now Slack and Heroku. It's expensive has a ton of operational overhead but everyone in that domain knows what it does and how to use it.