Comments on: Salesforce.com CEO: Customization is king

Marc Benioff argues that Apex will let customers diverge further from one-size-fits-all hosted applications approach.

[stuxstu]

How about a version that doesn't suck

The company I work for uses SaleForce.com and it sucks. They pitch this crappy software and then to make it functional you have to customize the hell out of it, pay for a bunch of application. That guess what need to be customized to "really" work right. After two years SalesForce.com is still customizing the software to fit our needs. We are stinking distributor. Act did 90% of what we needed out of the box for less than the $100.00 a user fee we pay now. The only thing we needed was a national database... again.

SalesForce.com just sucks.

[kasperon]

New to salesforce.com

Hi Stu,

good to know of your comments. my company uses MS CRM. It's
working fine for the basic needs as pipeline management.
No complicated dashboards, and no complex analytics.

But must say that it has its own set of problems too. As basic as
even getting our customised program to be loaded into Excel!!

MS still not come back to us on the 'bugs'. Now spending hours
researching for another tool.

SAP CRM is also getting in the way with complicated 'moves' just
to get simple data.

so again, still at lost of what's and who's the best out there?

so much money spend, hours lost, and talent wasted!!! Wonder if
these software companies are tapping on improving process or
into our pockets.

Yet we cannot do without them!

[pezcore37]

I'm missing something here...

Isn't the point of salesforce.com so you don't HAVE to customize your own software? So that a set of industry standard tools and metrics will be available for you without any upkeep or additional technology cost? I like the premise but they should just work harder to improve their product not shove it off the users. People will come up with 50 different ways to do the same thing and where is the value in that?

[princedudi]

What about the others?

Have you tried to customize sfdc yourself instead? Also have you tried one of the other CRM vendors such as Netsuite, Salesboom.com, RightNow?

[KreggRay]

Many people switch from salesforce.com to AppShore because their customer service is excellent, the price is a fraction of salesforce.com, the product is intuitive and easy-to-use, and it provides most of what small businesses need without all the bloat of what big companies want (but mostly never use).

Try AppShore http://www.appshore.com