[te_chris]

This reads like someone who’s never used the platform. It is broad, allows you to do a lot quickly and relatively more easily than most other platforms.

I’m not an evangelist, but I’m now a few years into using it at the startup where I’m CTO and it’s great at what it does and there isn’t really anything else that does it.

[bastawhiz]

Out of curiosity, how many non-enterprise alternatives to Salesforce have you really, genuinely evaluated?

I've personally never met anyone who has had anything nice to say about Salesforce. I've never heard anything especially bad, but I've heard so many complaints (especially from folks who have had to touch the API). From what I can see, Salesforce only has an advantage because they're the biggest, so everything and everyone works with it (in the same way that every tool that touches email integrates with Gmail).

[MajimasEyepatch]

“There are two kinds of programming languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.”

I feel like that applies here.

[phpisthebest]

The programming languages people complain about the most, are the ones I love to use. :)

[dzonga]

I see username to post ratio doesn't really apply here.

modern php is nice.

if you had said C++ then I would've labelled you a pragmatic masochist.

[ysavir]

I don't have any hands-on experience with Salesforce, but to me this is reminiscent of Jira. Nobody has anything nice to say about it, yet it's still the dominant player and people's go-to for project management, and no other tooling has managed to supplant it.

[tikhonj]

The people who have real problems with Jira and Salesforce aren't the ones who decide whether to use it.

[ghaff]

You're sort of saying this but Salesforce has an absolutely enormous ecosystem of partners. Dreamforce is one of the largest conferences in tech. (CES is probably bigger but there aren't many.)

[te_chris]

The API is fine and quite flexible. There are things that are very annoying (hello deploying updates from sandboxes to the production instance), but the APIs work, are generally well documented and have lots of options to generally get what I’ve needed to get done done.

[bastawhiz]

That has very much been the opposite of my coworkers' experience, which I was loosely involved with.

[bloblaw]

This is true, I did not use the platform as a user. I know it solves business problems and theyve built a big moat.

My commentary is on the company culture and focus on sales over quality. I just don’t think this is a company that knows how to organically innovate or integrate purchased innovation…and I think that makes them vulnerable to being overtaken by a competitor that solves the same business problems in a different way than they do now.

They’ll be around for decades. Just like many other formerly innovative companies hang around for a long time.