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Counter point seems to be Slack, which has become better (in my opinion) after the Salesforce Acquisition.

I think the struggle is that Salesforce has never historically offered a platform as a service business that is agnostic to its end goal. I imagine the idea of acquiring Heroku was to make it easy to spin up new Salesforce apps, but I don't know that ever materialized in the way they were hoping.




> Counter point seems to be Slack, which has become better (in my opinion) after the Salesforce Acquisition.

...which was only finalized about a year ago, and "phase one" of Salesforce's several-steps-plan that culminates in screwing up an acquisition is usually needlessly tinkering with pricing and packaging, which just happened recently [0].

The next step, if past patterns are predictors, will be an attempt to bundle Slack into their existing SKUs, then work on integrating Slack with their nightmare CRM codebase/dev-env, and then from there it's all downhill as velocity abruptly halts, the ratio of time spent doing meaningful work vs. time spent doing compliance busy-work stalls out completely, and the brain-drain begins.

[0] https://slack.com/blog/news/pricing-and-plan-updates


MuleSoft might also be a good analogy here, and they've owned that much longer, and by all accounts, was a successful acquisition.


By all accounts I heard internally, life at MuleSoft has become a death march now as they've gotten more integrated with the company at large.

MuleSoft is an ancient player that has a long history of doing enterprise software long enough that they were early adopters of SOAP. It is taking time for Salesforce to ruin it, but the process _is_ underway.




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