This mostly didn't work out for them back in the day but in more recent times as more and more low quality middle level managers and execs get hired they manage to get approvals.
In my org a new VP demanded Jira instance within a month of joining the company and that it be used for technical project reporting.
Of course all the developers said fuck no to that so for a while some managers were trying to do two way sync between Jira and Buganizer. When I left it was mostly abandoned and full of tumbleweed...
That's when you're supposed to pull the smooth-talking people that are usually in those roles and ask them a very simple question:
"Do you want this tool more than you want to be employed?"
It's true you need working software, but without sales and operations doing their part, the software will be scraped when the company folds.
Sales and operations get away with everything because they're the beating heart of any successful organization.
I think that it’s been diverted from its original purpose,and is now indeed horribly complicated since it’s supposed to be all in one package.
I’ve also noted that in large companies the quality of the product for end users, as long as it’s not a massive drag on productivity or on recruitment and is not core business, is irrelevant and that other factors are more important ( costs, contracts , easy to install integrate and maintain, quality of support, breadth of use within the company etc ). This makes atlassian a natural superpower.
And for making it a product: It's a quite competed market, with Salesforce, SAP, Google, Microsoft, ... and it doesn't fit to Google's "you're on your own" approach, but requires consulting and integration services, as introducing a CRM to a company involves analysing the existing processes and then adapting processes to software capabilities and adapting software to processes. (Which both often fails ...)
> The instance was used to store contact information and related notes for small and medium businesses. Analysis revealed that data was retrieved by the threat actor during a small window of time before the access was cut off. The data retrieved by the threat actor was confined to basic and largely publicly available business information, such as business names and contact details.
The ShinyHunters group is notable for their skilled phishing & voice-phishing (vishing).
shadowgovt•2h ago
On the other hand, the past decade-ish has seen them grow very rapidly via acquisition, so perhaps this DB was grandfathered in via an acquired company and hadn't yet been replaced by anything internal.
(For Salesforce in particular though, I'd be willing to believe Google doesn't have an in-house alternative... People asked for a Salesforce-like in Google Workspace for years and the company had no interest. I have a hunch that most Googlers find the idea of creating a new CRM to be a profoundly boring intellectual exercise).
mc32•1h ago
That said, you can hire people for any purpose (specific roles) and you can build what you want. It’s more a question of whether it’s worth it to build such solutions, after all you have a main line of business to tend to. That’s to say even Google and Apple have so called “boring “ roles and there are lots of people who don’t see it that way and want to work doing those things.
shadowgovt•1h ago
But even with their, what, 180,000 people these days, I think it's entirely possible nobody is as excited about CRM as Paul Buchheit was about email services.
progbits•1h ago
But yes your point stands, sometimes it just makes more sense to use an existing product.
eitally•1h ago
You might be surprised how much of what runs Google (Anaplan, for example, for XWS) is fairly industry standard.
bpodgursky•1h ago
Easy to hire experienced salespeople and have them hit the ground fast if they use standard Salesforce conversion flows.
dilyevsky•1h ago
eitally•1h ago
This led to consolidation of a number of back office IT teams that ultimately ended up with far more enforcement clout than they'd historically had. By the time Ruth changed roles, most of the "normal" business processes had been fairly standardized. Fwiw, the Cloud instance of SFDC, which is by far the most complex & customized, has been in full use for almost five years now and is the canonical source of truth for sales data.
coredog64•1h ago
shadowgovt•54m ago
I feel you about the ROI. In hindsight, it's a little funny to me that Salesforce is doing revenue numbers a little under half of Google Cloud; you'd think that would be large enough value to get Google interested in biting into that pie.
loeg•1h ago
Of all the things to NIH, this is one of the most defensible -- lots of bugtracker options just aren't very good.