Salesforce also owns Heroku, which is interesting, I guess. I don’t full understand the game that’s being played, though. They own the way I deploy all my apps, and the way I communicate with my colleagues, but I’m not seeing the synergy. Both products will do better with enterprise sales and adoption and Salesforce does that well? Is that it?
Oh, Salesforce probably has some grand ambition of becoming a "platform" in which "salesforce" proper is "just" first among equals. Moreso than the degree to which Salesforce is already a platform, I mean. Eventually probably headed for being a Company in a Box.
For instance, this just went by on New: https://blog.zoom.us/start-using-zoom-apps/ Zoom, unsatisfied with being the dominant video chat app, now wants to be a "platform" for running apps.
While I understand the nominal business case, the business schools teaching MBAs to reach for this particular golden ring could probably stand to emphasize the importance of continuing to develop the core product as the foundation you expect to stand on in order to become this larger "platform"; seems like in practice, this sort of thing is also an announcement that their core product is now going to begin a long slide into a decaying buggy mess as it gets deprioritized internally in favor of the "platform" product, whereas the platform product usually fails, often non-trivially precisely because they got so excited about all that sweet, sweet lock-in walled-garden platform money that they let their foundation rot and all the wallets they meant to lock in their walled garden wandered away.
> Salesforce probably has some grand ambition of becoming a "platform" in which "salesforce" proper is "just" first among equals.
I think they started that in the late 2000’s and accomplished it by 2011 or so. Salesforce was the first business to prove SaaS was a viable business model and then launched themselves as a generic application builder that we now call PaaS.
I don’t disagree with your view, but to me, Salesforce isn't another wannabe platform. They’re the one who figured out how to make that path work. (Also, arguably AWS)
In the case of Zoom, this is probably a necessity. It is only a matter of time before the big companies muscle in on video chat now that the pandemic has shown demand and forced their hand.
If zoom doesn't have a strategy to either diversify or get bought out, they are probably doomed to a slow death.
> Zoom still has the best UX from what I can tell though
Can you explain how? To me it seems like the most clunky option that largely became big because people used its name in place of the concept. Some adoption is for latency benefits, but it's not like it's great at that either.
- It desperately wants me not to use the web app
- The desktop app opens a bunch of separate windows, largely without much of a purpose
- The desktop app for some reason requires audio to be enabled separately
- Only the host can share their screen by default
- The "leave meeting" button seems to confuse many people due to its weird one-button submenu
By contrast basically every alternative is just a single click to join, doesn't require extra permissions for core functionality, joins audio by default and just leaves the meeting when you press the button for it.
Zoom just works for me, but I use the desktop app. I don't mind that an additional window opens. After starting a meeting or joining one, I can close everything except the meeting window. If I want to leave a meeting, I just close the app. It does ask me to confirm if I want to leave, but I don't mind that either.
I do remember how unreliable WebEx was (dropped calls, bad audio, bad video, etc). That was also a desktop app experience, but it was a few years back.
I have used Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts recently as well, although only in the browser. They seemed clunkier to me, but it looks like Microsoft Teams has a desktop app, so maybe the experience of that is better.
I've also tried Discord video calls on their desktop app, but the audio and video quality just didn't compare to Zoom, but maybe it's better with a better plan. Slack calls seemed mostly OK but that was just for a 1 on 1 call, and overall I still preferred Zoom.
In my experience it also seems like Zoom handles low connectivity well, although sometimes it speeds voices up to catch up, but again, I don't mind and then I feel like at least I'm not missing what other folks are saying. Anyway, in general, the experience of Zoom for me has been better than anything other meeting software I've tried.
They mainly own a set of enterprise solutions. Salesforce is now a massive cloud ERP that has CRM, eCommerce and other modules - Heroku is actually pretty small within that universe.
It makes sense to me that they would want to own conversations in order to cross-sell and up-sell solutions in their portfolio, and also defend against Microsoft which has Teams.
Heroku has a good use case as being the quick default way to deploy Salesforce platform applications, so there’s definitely some synergy there, but the Heroku for everybody else is languishing a bit.
Slack, don’t know, maybe it’s going to be the default communications platforms for Salesforce products and integrations.
That's what I see it as - Salesforce defending their core product against encroachment by the Office 365 suite - if your company is already on that and Microsoft begins offering Salesforce-like products, selling Salesforce itself becomes a harder prospect.
Probably similar to how organizations go through the approval process for Google, Amazon or Microsoft. Once the company is approved, any of their services are green lit for use at the company.
I could see Salesforce approaching it from that direction. Good investment that gets them in the door of more companies.
I think there's some synergy in reducing management structure to save costs on Heroku and use it as a revenue stream. Also, salesforce has a large enterprise sales force, so this is another product that can be sold by the same team.
Like what? Nothing I’ve seen comes close to the ease of use and developer experience. My only gripe is that they’re US and EU only, would like an APAC region.
Fly.io is a leap ahead, probably move there next. But what’s a better Heroku than Heroku?
Heroku is perfectly fine, and it's also squarely targeted at the small end of deployment. Why fret about $20/month vs $30/month when you have bigger issues to worry about?
Also, to their credit, they have kept the free tier still going, more or less. I'd have expected Salesforce to have killed that.
