Ask HN: Why is Salesforce still successful?

I was looking for a good CRM and Salesforce seemed like the unquestioned leader.

We’ve had a meeting with a sales rep in their luxurious offices at the foot of the Eiffel tower. Despite 2 hours of phone interview before, the sales rep had no understanding of our business and the product demo was extremely disappointing.

The platform is not user friendly at all and the transition to the new ‘lightning experience’ makes it even more terrible, forcing the user to go back and forth between the two interfaces and to cope with outdated documentation.

They have a large number of complex solutions with as many different pricing plan and limitations, a closed platform, no big enthusiasm around the community, a high pricing (130€/user/month for the sales product only). They claimed to be the “most innovative company in the world” but want customers to sign a 24-month contract. They do not provide any help in setting up the platform. And I could keep going…

To me it seems that Salesforce is buying growth by investing heavily on sales and very little in product development. The only benefit of Salesforce over its competitors comes from its monopoly position. Salesforce remains the only platforms to have integrations with the software we use (integrations which they did not develop themselves of course).

I had a quick look at their financial statements which reassured my opinion: negative earning, growing capital surplus, growing goodwill… In the annual report, the company is fond of separating out "non-GAAP" earnings to show adjusted positive income. But the reality is that long periods of GAAP losses means the company should not be worth 46$Bn.

In the SaaS industry ‘fast eats big’. Salesforce can only afford so many acquisition of overpriced start-ups and hopefully someone will come with a great product that they can’t kill in the egg.

Why do you use Salesforce? Can you recommend a cheaper and better alternative?