[echelon]

FAANG used to over-employ not just due to ZIRP, but also in the fear that their engineers would build competing products.

These companies enjoy healthy margins. Unemployed engineers can duplicate the core functionality and offer it for less.

[pembrook]

This was always a myth and never a real thing, except for at the highest, bleeding edge talent levels.

Especially for Enterprise Saas companies like Salesforce/Microsoft/Oracle/etc who know full well that their real competency isn’t actually the software…it’s distribution. Employees aren’t choosing to use those products, they get forced into them by management/IT or literal monopoly.

Sales is everything in B2B software and always has been. Product-led growth in B2B has always been fantasy erotic-fiction outside of chat/notes apps.

[chii]

While sales is true for large enterprises, in SME and lower ones, it's users' wants and value-for-money that dominate. This domination can lead to nowhere, but quite occasionally, it leaks out as users move jobs and into positions of "power" in the larger enterprise, and choose their familiar software instead of the existing/encumbent ones.

Then these new startups get a foot hold, and become the dominant software, grow in size and learn how to B2B sale as well.

[safety1st]

Very interesting, what are some good examples of this happening?

[ipaddr]

Stack, Zoom, Trello, Dropbox, Canva, Notion, AirTable..

Asana, Figma, Miro, Box, Evernote, ClickUp, Basecamp, Zapier, HubSpot, Calendly, Shopify, WordPress

[jamwil]

This is also the stated rationale for Cloudflare’s generous free tier. They build loyalty with hobby and side projects, and engineers take that familiarity to work with them.

[cjblomqvist]

DigitalOcean also had a strategy of going after the little guys/early phases of companies with their 5$ offering and lots of good free material/tutorials.

[octacat]

yes, Slack and github strategy. After Slack got big, it shrunk what it provides for open-source communities though. So, expect Cloudflare eventually switch.

[chii]

atlassian is the big one - jira actually beat out basecamp (and fogbugz), despite them being quite similar at the beginning, and ousted the incumbent that is ibm rational suite and their ilk.

[anovikov]

They did it by one simple trick - becoming the first ones who offered free license for open-sourcers. They invented this idea. After that, they needed to do nothing more, almost automatically becoming a monopoly. I was there working for one of the early competitors who was thrown in the dust by that decision of Atlassian and was too late to realise they had to do the same - and folded two years later.

[spamizbad]

Being able to use company email on your personal devices and Mac laptops come to mind

[ReDeiPirati]

> Sales is everything in B2B software and always has been. Product-led growth in B2B has always been fantasy erotic-fiction outside of chat/notes apps.

PLG creates the distribution to actually implement Sales effectively and at scale for B2B. Even those companies that originally were purely Sales-led now have a strong PLG component. PLG is far from be a fantasy, but now it's almost a must have motion to build distribution and long term healthy business viability considering also that Enterprise software is living a consumerization moment. Not to mention that the next generations of users and buyers buy and expect software to be different from the past, this is already happening.

[wbl]

That wasn't true for the first spreadsheet apps or database apps. Or Autodesk back when it first appeared.

[antonvs]

The world has changed since then. A lot.

[flashgordon]

I seriously wonder why this is not happening more given all the copilots available. I guess the h1bs don't have the time/appetite to do this. Wouldn't locals have enough of a vendetta to do this?

[lazide]

Salesforce is a sales driven org. It’s hard for engineers (and essentially impossible for H1B’s) to replace that.

[forgetfreeman]

Given my exposure to the product and portions of it's userbase I -want- to call it a cult more than anything else, mostly based on years spent fucking around in the back end of one salesforce instance after another trying to get it to replicate functionality that I could have gotten online in an afternoon with a 2 page training document and a couple shared Google spreadsheets. I am clearly not in the target audience as I do -not- see the value proposition and never have.

[GolfPopper]

The target audience seems to be whoever makes the decision to pay for it. Much like the allegations that the QWERTY layout was designed to make it easier for salesmen to type out "TYPEWRITER" quickly, I expect that salesforce's primary design goal is "stuff that will let us sell it to management" with actual performance/utility a distant second (or less).

[forgetfreeman]

That jives with my observations as well. What always had me deeply mystified was the near-religious conviction among small and medium sized nonprofits that they absolutely couldn't function without a feature complete clone of the kind of Salesforce integration that drove the ACLU, UNICEF, and International Rescue Committee websites. I'm like, y'all could cut your spend on web development by 70% if I could train someone to click a button once a week and import the resulting .csv into a spreadsheet. Crazy shit.

[lazide]

It’s a variant of ‘no one got fired for buying IBM’. Microsoft has a similar position now in their niche. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/duenablomstrom1/2018/11/30/nobo...]

[griomnib]

Dreamforce is basically a cult gathering.

[flashgordon]

True that. It I was thinking more about other products that are "lowish" scale and not ad driven. Especially SaaS products.

[throwaway83626]

The problem with "lowish" scale SaaS products is often not creating them, but selling them. I work for a SaaS that has added a lot of features during the years, but the product 2 years ago could probably easily be created by a single dev in a couple of months and could be sellable as a product to a subset of the market today.

The reason why I don't create a simplified version of the SaaS and sell to customers is that the sales process itself is actually the hard part. You may get some sales from ads or phone calls, but you often need to sell it in person if you want to have enough customers to cover all the expenses. And if you want enterprise customers, the sales process is complex and time consuming

[tjpnz]

>in the fear that their engineers would build competing products.

Is there any evidence to support this? It would imply that even their least promising employees would still pose a threat which seems unlikely.

[cellis]

What they really meant by this is: “Competing products [at peer companies]”.

This is still in effect, however the primary competing products at peer rivals is now “foundational ai”, and they need far less people and mostly people of a very specific skill sets of ML research, Inference Scaling, Hardware R&D, AI prompt engineering research. Also the cost to play is 10 billion minimum.

So Salesforce will perform rent seeking as long as their moat allows rather than gamble on foundational ai.