nytimes.com
www.nytimes.com

Ron Conway stepped down from the board of Salesforce’s philanthropic arm after the company’s chief executive, Marc Benioff, said he supported President Trump and wanted the National Guard to come to San Francisco.

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        41·
        1 day ago

        I mean, I’m serious. Like, it’s a big CRM platform that people use and I understand has an ecosystem of software that integrates with it, is well-established.

        It’s like, someone may not like Photoshop. Frankly, I avoided it in favor of Gimp since the early 2000s, and I really don’t like the fact that it’s SaaS now.

        But you can’t just say “Photoshop sucks, artists use charcoal sticks now”. You have to have that alternative, like Gimp. And even then, people are going to have some loss in experience and loss in integrated software (like plugins and stuff) in a switch.

        I don’t do CRM. But my understanding is that it does matter and that that ecosystem matters, and “just throw one’s hands up in the air and tell people not to use a CRM platform” is probably not going to fly.

        kagis

        I thought that SugarCRM was open-source, but it looks like I’m a decade out-of-date — it started as an open-source project, but apparently the company founded around it took it proprietary. And I bet that it doesn’t compare in size in terms of people with experience with it or software that integrates with it.

        kagis

        https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-ecosystem/

        The Salesforce ecosystem is an absolute behemoth. Salesforce employs around 70,000 people and is the biggest employer in Silicon Valley. They also have a market cap of a quarter of a trillion – pretty impressive, right?

        However, when you look at the Salesforce ecosystem, there are 15M people involved in Salesforce’s community who work as end users, in consultancies, and for app companies. The Salesforce economy is also predicted to generate revenues of six times that of Salesforce by 2026.

        Like, you’re not gonna move that overnight.

        It could be that Salesforce sucks on a technical level as a platform. I don’t know, haven’t used it. But what I’m saying is that I suspect that for a lot of users, they aren’t in a great position to plop in an existing replacement overnight.

        EDIT: It sounds like there’s a continuing open-source fork of SugarCRM, SuiteCRM. This is the first I’ve heard of it, though, so I kinda suspect that the userbase isn’t massive.

        • badgermurphy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          18 hours ago

          I can’t speak for a company of 30,000, but I know tons of companies with a couple thousand employees or less that could, without a doubt, write their own tools in house to do the bits and pieces of SalesForce they actually are using for far less than they are spending on SalesForce. As they grow, their SalesForce costs grow linearly or worse, while an in-house tool’s grow at a decreasing rate.

          Any company that size or larger already has some kind of technology division that can be grown to accommodate the development.

          For those really big companies, I imagine their SalesForce bill is so high they might have potential alternative options I can’t even imagine at those prices.