
How LinkedIn Drove a Wedge Between Microsoft and Salesforce - miraj
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/technology/how-linkedin-drove-a-wedge-between-microsoft-and-salesforce.html
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chollida1
I'm going to come out and say I think the article over played its hand in
trying to describe a riff between the two companies.

Once a company gets big enough you'll find that it often both competes and
partners with the same company at the same time.

It's just inevitable, as the salesforce trying out Microsoft's Azure while
competing with Microsoft's Dynamics arm.

Good CEO's are pragmatic, almost out of necessity, as being inflexible is the
quickest way to become unemployed.

I'll go out on a limb here and state that I believe that salesforce will
eventually be owned by Microsoft.

it gives Microsoft 3 things.

1) Enough revenue to make a dent in Microsoft's growth.

Remember the old saying that Microsoft has to grow by one eBay each year just
to keep wall street happy. Sales force is big enough to move the needle for
Microsoft.

2) it provides a cap stone customer for Azure.

I think Azure is fully featured and mature enough that everyone will consider
it to be in the same category as amazon or google's cloud offering but, this
checks off a box for Fortune 500 CTO's who need to see a big customer using
it.

Something Something something ... never getting fired for buying IBM

3) Sales force is going up against oracle and Microsoft here. They are just
learning what Yahoo when through.

Trying to compete against competitors who have cash cow monopolies in other
areas that allow them to fund a business to compete against you really gets
tough quickly.

Salesforce is well run and has a great start but billions of dollars a year in
almost guaranteed profit gives companies alot of time and opportunity to
compete and fail over and over again until they get it right.

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apapli
> Salesforce is well run and has a great start but billions of dollars a year
> in almost guaranteed profit gives companies alot of time and opportunity to
> compete and fail over and over again until they get it right.

The main issue they have is that their product can be replicated easily, which
is exactly what Microsoft are doing (and extending, with Dynamics365). With so
much revenue tied up in renewals SFDC cannot simply drop their pricing to come
down to the price point Microsoft is leading with. SFDC have indeed set the
gold standard for CRM but they are starting to show signs of weakness as they
struggle to differentiate with core CRM, and need to compete on edge use
cases.

I hear in Australia SFDC are now in a hiring "freeze", which is very telling
of the challenges they are now facing with some competitors finally maturing
and giving them a run for their money.

I give SFDC 2-3 more years under the sun before they start having serious
challenges... unless AMZN buy them, which I also expect is highly likely. That
would make things interesting.

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cortesoft
Lovely how you can't read half the words in the subtitle, because it is white
text against white background.

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BinaryIdiot
You're not kidding. They didn't even put a black border around the words. I'm
surprised it hasn't been fixed yet as well; wouldn't an editor or someone
catch that?

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web007
They do have a border, it's just too subtle:

    
    
      .headline {
        text-shadow: 0 0 3px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.25);
      }

~~~
BinaryIdiot
Wow yeah couldn't even tell at all.

