<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>flukus</author><text>&amp;gt; To some extent, Salesforce is like a new way of programming. Instead of writing code, you let non-technical people change models and UIs (and to some extent, controllers).&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s the theory, in practice companies end up paying through the nose for an army of salesforce consultants, same as with every other &amp;quot;zero code&amp;quot; platform.</text><parent_chain><item><author>dvdhsu</author><text>Hi, I&amp;#x27;m one of the authors of the post. As an engineer, I&amp;#x27;ve always wondered what Salesforce was. It seemed like a clunky, expensive piece of legacy software that the &amp;quot;business people&amp;quot; always used.&lt;p&gt;Since starting a SaaS company myself (Retool; &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tryretool.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tryretool.com&lt;/a&gt;), I now understand a lot more, hah. Salesforce, basically, is the source of truth for your customer, for the business-side of things (sales, marketing, operations, etc.). So the stuff we would typically store in our databases (company name, users, how much they pay us, etc.) is stored inside of Salesforce. And Salesforce gives you a bunch of views that a typical company would need — views to update the close date of a contract, the value of a contract, to take notes on a call, etc.&lt;p&gt;The cool thing about Salesforce is how customizable it is — you can change the database models (e.g. &amp;quot;add a column to the `Leads` table&amp;quot;), as well as change the front-ends themselves (e.g. &amp;quot;I want to display this data in this view&amp;quot;). I&amp;#x27;ve previously used a lot of SaaS (e.g. Slack, Intercom, etc.) and it&amp;#x27;s always frustrating because I can&amp;#x27;t customize the views (e.g. in Slack, maybe I want to add a button to mute + clear all the notifications for this channel). Salesforce lets you customize all that, which, frankly, is really cool.&lt;p&gt;To some extent, Salesforce is like a new way of programming. Instead of writing code, you let non-technical people change models and UIs (and to some extent, controllers).&lt;p&gt;Happy to answer any questions! If you all think the essay could be improved in any way, LMK too :)&lt;p&gt;(Edit: added blurb about SFDC being a new way of programming, in response to a comment downstream.)</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>What&apos;s Salesforce?</title><url>https://tryretool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>jiveturkey</author><text>You didn&amp;#x27;t stress the most important part well enough:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; But when you bolt on other apps and 3rd-party APIs, it gets close to programming without code: a new way to build software.&lt;p&gt;SFDC is worth $100B not because it&amp;#x27;s a CRM. It&amp;#x27;s worth that much because it&amp;#x27;s a CRM platform. The &amp;quot;what it does&amp;quot; is not nearly as important as the ecosystem&amp;#x2F;platform aspect of it.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What it does&amp;quot; has no moat. Platforms have a moat. That&amp;#x27;s the value of SFDC in a nutshell.&lt;p&gt;You could help highlight this by drawing attention to it earlier, and also by boldfacing the sentence just before my quote where you say &amp;quot;platform&amp;quot;.</text><parent_chain><item><author>dvdhsu</author><text>Hi, I&amp;#x27;m one of the authors of the post. As an engineer, I&amp;#x27;ve always wondered what Salesforce was. It seemed like a clunky, expensive piece of legacy software that the &amp;quot;business people&amp;quot; always used.&lt;p&gt;Since starting a SaaS company myself (Retool; &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tryretool.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tryretool.com&lt;/a&gt;), I now understand a lot more, hah. Salesforce, basically, is the source of truth for your customer, for the business-side of things (sales, marketing, operations, etc.). So the stuff we would typically store in our databases (company name, users, how much they pay us, etc.) is stored inside of Salesforce. And Salesforce gives you a bunch of views that a typical company would need — views to update the close date of a contract, the value of a contract, to take notes on a call, etc.&lt;p&gt;The cool thing about Salesforce is how customizable it is — you can change the database models (e.g. &amp;quot;add a column to the `Leads` table&amp;quot;), as well as change the front-ends themselves (e.g. &amp;quot;I want to display this data in this view&amp;quot;). I&amp;#x27;ve previously used a lot of SaaS (e.g. Slack, Intercom, etc.) and it&amp;#x27;s always frustrating because I can&amp;#x27;t customize the views (e.g. in Slack, maybe I want to add a button to mute + clear all the notifications for this channel). Salesforce lets you customize all that, which, frankly, is really cool.&lt;p&gt;To some extent, Salesforce is like a new way of programming. Instead of writing code, you let non-technical people change models and UIs (and to some extent, controllers).&lt;p&gt;Happy to answer any questions! If you all think the essay could be improved in any way, LMK too :)&lt;p&gt;(Edit: added blurb about SFDC being a new way of programming, in response to a comment downstream.)</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>What&apos;s Salesforce?</title><url>https://tryretool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers/</url></story>