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Do any of you use Salesforce.com regularly?

2 points by davidu ↗ HN
SF was created to be a less sucky version of SAP. Their motto is "The end of software."

I've been playing with it recently and I have to say, it's absolutely horrible. The most complicated and unfriendly piece of software I have ever had the displeasure of using.

Do your sales people actually like this thing?

Are you developing applications for their platform?

3 comments

[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 19.4 ms ] thread
mrtron
Yes, sales people love it because they hear from other salespeople 'Oh you have to get on Salesforce dot com'.

I haven't developed anything using their API.

I have used it a bit, and it is much better than it was ~5 years ago, but still is pretty much horrible.

_b8r0
We use it, we like it, we don't customise it much and use it more as a tool for maintaining contact and pipeline management than a full on CRM, which is probably why it works well for us!
[dead] ltbarcly
I've developed a handful of things using APEX and their webservices API.

I've found APEX is a weird combination of a Java-like language, and you query their database with a goofy, SQL like syntax. But the language isn't Java, and the syntax isn't SQL. This is very odd, because you are locked in to their weird crap, and it is pretty much crap, for a task that could easily be done using regular sql and a regular database. Instead you trade simple and known techniques for something obscure, incompatible and poorly documented, which is basically just different enough from sql and java to be incompatible (you use single quotes instead of double quotes in APEX, to make writing the weird sql like queries easier for someone who doesn't know how to escape a character I guess).

And what do you get for all this tradeoff? Basically simple CRUD operations on simple 'contact' datatypes.

It is a miserable piece of shit, hodgepodged together with seemingly no rhyme or reason, and the 'documentation' is basically a list of examples you can cut and paste and modify without really increasing your understanding.

Visiting their forums, you suddenly realize the meaning of the term 'cargo cult programming'. I have seen many examples of code submitted as 'answers' that even a cursory glance at revealed line upon line of unreachable or otherwise no-effect code, and so on.

Salesforce.com is, in other words, MS Access for the internet age.