Microsoft Just Showed Off Exactly What Salesforce Was Worried About (cnbc.com)

Microsoft just took a direct swipe at Salesforce with a new enterprise-ready version of LinkedIn's customer relationship management product called Sales Navigator. From a report on CNBC: "Today's announcements take Sales Navigator to the next level," Doug Camplejohn, LinkedIn sales solutions head of product, said in a blog. The new product steps up competition with arch rival Salesforce. Microsoft beat out Salesforce to acquire Linkedin for $26.2 billion -- by far the company's largest acquisition to date -- in June. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was so concerned, he accused the company of "anti-competitive behavior" and urged regulators to investigate. Flash-forward less than a year and Microsoft's new Sales Navigator Enterprise Edition incorporates many features aimed at turning LinkedIn into a must-have tool for sales teams at big companies.

Comments

Alternative competitiveness

[bruce_the_loon]

Oh boo-hoo Salesforce, MS has had a CRM for decades, just not a particularly good one. Now it has a somewhat better one, all of a sudden you can't compete in an open market with what you've got? Build a better one then.

And while you're at it, can anyone build a CRM that doesn't require signing off souls to all three Hells to make it work? I've only got one and Satan, Cthulhu and Kali all require exclusive rights to it.

Re: Alternative competitiveness

[cyber-vandal]

Dynamics CRM is pretty terrible. I hope this new thing is a lot better.

Re:Alternative competitiveness

[angelasmark]

And while you're at it, can anyone build a CRM that doesn't require signing off souls to all three Hells to make it work? I've only got one and Satan, Cthulhu and Kali all require exclusive rights to it.

You clearly have been outsourcing the wrong jobs in your organization sir.

Re:Alternative competitiveness

[Kjella]

And while you're at it, can anyone build a CRM that doesn't require signing off souls to all three Hells to make it work? I've only got one and Satan, Cthulhu and Kali all require exclusive rights to it.

Don't worry, my CRM only requires you sign over your soul once*.

* May contain an irrevokable clause to sublicense your soul.

Re:Alternative competitiveness

[ranton]

And while you're at it, can anyone build a CRM that doesn't require signing off souls to all three Hells to make it work? I've only got one and Satan, Cthulhu and Kali all require exclusive rights to it.

To reflect your own callousness, oh boo-hoo to management who think they can try to do things on the cheap and still have a quality solution at the end. And yes, sometimes spending millions of dollars can still be on the cheap for large projects. There are plenty of competent CRM professionals and consultants who can set up any of the major CRM platforms for you which will work very well for any company with reasonable expectations.

All of the major players have deficiencies, but none of those cannot be fixed with quality implementation partners. Just get your head out of your ass and try to do something right for a change.

Re:Alternative competitiveness

[Richard_at_work]

I'm interested in what SalesForce was going to use LinkedIn for, if not precisely this - they are basically whining about someone else doing what they intended to do, while trying to push it as some sort of abuse of monopoly (where exactly is the monopoly here?)

Re:Alternative competitiveness

[Attila Dimedici]

Perhaps you did not notice, but this article was not produced by Salesforce and does not contain ANY information from anyone at SalesForce.

It is merely the opinion of the author of the article that SalesForce is concerned by this development. The only evidence they provide for that theory is that a Salesforce representative accused MS of anti-competitive behavior during the negotiations to buy LinkedIn (possibly as an effort to get regulators to pressure MS out of buying LinkedIn).
I do not actually see this giving MS any strategic advantage...the more this gets used, the more likely I am to remove my LinkedIn account.

Re:Alternative competitiveness

[Attila Dimedici]

SalesForce is not whining. This writer of the article appears to have written a press release for Microsoft talking about how this innovation has Salesforce shaking in their boots. The author could not even be bothered to ask anyone at Salesforce what they thought of this new development.

Re: Alternative competitiveness

[sed quid in infernos]

No I do not understand. I would very much like someone to explain what these do. That's not a sarcastic accusation that they do nothing. I genuinely want to know.

Re:Alternative competitiveness

[Richard_at_work]

My comment refers to the Marc Benioff quote from June - it was whining.

Re: Alternative competitiveness

[I'm New Around Here]

I'm signed up with LinkedIn. Every so often is spams me that someone else I know is also on LinkedIn, or asks me to spam other people I know to join LinkedIn.

Other than that, I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with it. I never have used it as any resource. I think it simply convinced a few people to sign up with them, and infected the internet from there.

Re: Alternative competitiveness

[Anonymous Coward]

Having LinkedIn behind your CRM is like having a Rolodex of people who might be interested in buying something from you if you call them, except that all those people *want* to be on your Rolodex and actively make sure their contact information is up to date.

Re:Alternative competitiveness

[rubycodez]

no the boo-hoo-hoo is that Microsoft just turned linkedin into a phone, mail and email spam engine

that's why I filled my linkedin account with bogus information and then cancelled when microsoft buy announced

Re:Alternative competitiveness

[Anonymous Coward]

CRMs lie in that dark triangle between Sales, IT, enterprise software, and Bullshit Business Buzzword Bingo (Yes that's a triangle with 4 sides) - It's going to awful no matter what. It's going to be painfully expensive and it always has to work. It's woven in to your business logic. The vendor knows this. They have you by the balls. They spared no expense wooing your bosses with only the finest coke to be snorted off the most expensive hookers getting there in the first place.

Re:Alternative competitiveness

[Altrag]

By your logic, the only database systems in the world should be Oracle and MSSQL.

Just because all the "big" players are currently absurdly over-complicated and expensive doesn't mean there isn't or shouldn't be a desire for something more reasonable.

Hell I'm sure there's already more than one open source CRM out there. Just a question of one of them getting enough features and enough public awareness to become "big" in the same kind of context that Postgres or MySQL are well-known and well-used alternatives to Oracle and MSSQL. Sure they still require some knowledge but its not like you have to hire a $300/hr consultant to get a Postgres database running well enough for small to mid-sized projects.

Re: Alternative competitiveness

[Altrag]

You can somewhat think of it as a weak form of references. A prospective employer is likely to try searching you out on LI to see who you know and what they do (and of course you can store resume-like information such as job history and whatnot on LI if you want as well.)

As long as you're not looking for a new job or considering doing such though, its mostly just a spam generation system.

Re:Alternative competitiveness

[ranton]

By your logic, the only database systems in the world should be Oracle and MSSQL. Just because all the "big" players are currently absurdly over-complicated and expensive doesn't mean there isn't or shouldn't be a desire for something more reasonable. Hell I'm sure there's already more than one open source CRM out there. Just a question of one of them getting enough features and enough public awareness to become "big" in the same kind of context that Postgres or MySQL are well-known and well-used alternatives to Oracle and MSSQL. Sure they still require some knowledge but its not like you have to hire a $300/hr consultant to get a Postgres database running well enough for small to mid-sized projects.

When a CRM implementation is unsuccessful, it is almost certainly not because they didn't pay enough in software licensing. It is more likely because they didn't put enough human resources into implementing them successfully. And the cost to hire quality staff to implement proprietary vs open source solutions is not significantly different. There are cheap MSSQL consultants and cheap Postgres consultants, but quality resources for either are just as expensive.

So by my logic it really doesn't matter if you choose Salesforce or Sugar CRM, skimping on implementation costs will sink any CRM initiative.

Re:Alternative competitiveness

[Altrag]

The trouble is when those "implementation costs" are $20k for the base platform, another $10-15k in addons/extensions/plugins/whatever and then $100-300/hr for consultants to set it all up and suddenly you're looking at 6-12 months and $100k in cost to get it going.

That's out of the price range of many small to mid sized businesses. You have to be pushing the higher end of "mid sized" before that becomes a plausible cost.

To compare with Postgres: Yes, if you need a massive database to handle multiple terabytes of data and thousands of concurrent connections, you're probably going to want someone who knows what the hell they're doing to set it up, and it will cost you.

On the other hand, if you just want a couple dozen small tables to be used internally by your 5-person staff, pretty much anyone with even minimal DB experience can get that up and running.

That's the difference -- PG handles basically any size of operation. Yes bigger is costlier of course, but smaller is possible which is not really something you get with SF. If you can't afford $50-100k up front costs plus who knows how much over the long term in maintenance and support, you're left with good old Excel spreadsheets and other hackjob "systems," which is what many many companies still use.

Like I said, I'm sure there are CRMs (including, though not specifically, open source ones) that are more reasonable but none of them have taken enough market share to be really well-known and common in the same way that Postgres and MySQL have done in the database market.

What about the LA Clippers?

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFS:

In the second quarter, Sales Navigator subscriptions increased 20 percent over the prior year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on the company's most recent quarterly earnings conference call. Customers include SAP, Ernst & Young, The Sacramento Kings, Symantec and PayPal.

What about Steve Ballmer's Clippers? Enquiring minds, you know.

Re:What about the LA Clippers?

[Enigma2175]

Notice they didn't give actual subscriber numbers. A 20% increase would be significant if they went from 1 million to 1.2 million customers but if they went from 10 to 12 it's not as impressive. Seeing as how Microsoft seems to fumble everything (internet, Zune, Windows phone, Xbox [at least initially]) that isn't their core business (Windows and Office) I don't think Salesforce should be too scared yet.

Re:What about the LA Clippers?

[BronsCon]

Have you used recent versions of Windows or Office? You could have stopped at "everything" and been just as right. I say this as a primarily Windows shop that keeps a few Macs handy and runs infrastructure primarily on Linux.

Salesforce isn't just sales

[rsilvergun]

it's a complete WYSIWYG application platform that can build complex business apps without code ("Clicks not Code" in SF parlance). It's basically Visual Basic 6 for the web.

OTOH I see a lot of shops using VF/Apex to build apps for no good reason (especially in the post Lightening era). But still, properly used Salesforce makes it child's play to build, deploy and update fairly complex business apps. I can't help but wonder if Microsoft & LinkedIn are willing to put the money behind building that sort of application platform.

Re:Salesforce isn't just sales

[ewhac]

it's a complete WYSIWYG application platform that can build complex business apps without code ("Clicks not Code" in SF parlance). It's basically Visual Basic 6 for the web.

Thank you. I've been trying to figure out what SalesForce actually is for months. This is the most complete, intelligible description I've seen anywhere.

Re:Salesforce isn't just sales

[Altrag]

Microsoft builds a new, frequently unnecessary language every 3 or 4 years anyway.. I doubt they'd have a problem with that. How well they'd do, especially in the first few iterations, is up for grabs though of course.

Re:Salesforce isn't just sales

[Hognoxious]

Generating apps without coding? I remember my grandpa talking about that. CASE, I think that's what they called it.

Re:Salesforce isn't just sales

[DarthVain]

We're currently looking into a number of CRM type platforms (we haven't landed on a single one yet, though both Salesforce and Dynamics are in the mix) to try an consolidate and replace a number of legacy systems, mostly from a cost, consistency, and interoperability standpoint. Our business isn't sales. However two points; One as you mention with a bit of creativity it can be applied to anything really to a less or greater degree depending on what you are doing, and Two is that it doesn't mean you cannot do custom work on top of it, only that you need to try and minimize it (because that is the advantage of the CRM, and probably more importantly each time they release a new version of said CRM may break whatever it is your custom crap did).

An example I thought about would be tracking and invoicing Royalties collected from a mining operation. So while it isn't selling "Widgets", you could create a product of "1 Tonne of Aggregate" or whatever the commodity is assigning it the accepted value (say 0.75$), so when the mining client reports in the extraction of 315,600 tonnes of material (ideally directly into the CRM), it can automatically calculate the Royalty bill of 236,700$ and sent it off. Doing this with all clients, storing the data, and being able to run metrics on it over years, would be great. Could contain the client information with all the mine specifications etc... Anyway it just takes a bit of imagination and thinking outside of the box to apply a CRM to something other then "I'm a store, and I sell things to customers" model.

wait... what?

[RobertNotBob]

Wait... Why is it such a news flash that a company is making moves to make their products more valuable to their existing customers, and to expand market share? -- That is, in fact, what they should be expected to do, right??

Re:wait... what?

[number6x]

Wait... Why is it such a news flash that a company is making moves to make their products more valuable to their existing customers, and to expand market share? -- That is, in fact, what they should be expected to do, right??

Yes, but this is Microsoft. For the last decade or so their idea of "make their products more valuable to their existing customers" is getting rid of features, hiding controls and interface selections from users and making the software more difficult to manage on the back end.

Let's not talk about how they expand market share.

If MS is creating a competitive product and expanding market share, good for them! That is big news for them. As you so correctly noted, this is just what is expected from every other company on Earth, but so novel and exciting to see Microsoft trying to do it.

Re:wait... what?

[El Cubano]

If MS is creating a competitive product and expanding market share, good for them! That is big news for them. As you so correctly noted, this is just what is expected from every other company on Earth, but so novel and exciting to see Microsoft trying to do it.

This really could be a stroke of genius on the part of MS. A CRM tool is only as good as the information that goes into it. If everybody on the team is not disciplined in putting good information into the tool, then garbage-in-garbage-out. The genius that I see here is this is a CRM that leverages a platform where the customer wants to put into it as much work-related information about themselves as they can. My LinkedIn network isn't that big and I see a constant stream of things where people are patting themselves on the back for some new job, certification, or other such thing. From a sales perspective, each of those events represents a potential opportunity to engage, or a lead. It would be the equivalent of each time a mention something cool I did at work it was via an email to every salesperson with whom I had come into contact.

If executed properly, this could be a rather significant development in the CRM space. This is especially valuable because as a salesperson, everything depends on timing and the LinkedIn activity feed is nothing but a stream of potential cues: "I see that John just took a new position at his company. Now is a good time to connect back up with him and see if there is anything I can offer to help him in his new role." That is not the sort of insight you typically get form a CRM system.

given their track record, i doubt it.

[nimbius]

Zune: failed to compete with ipod.
Microsoft Phone: failed to compete with either android or iPhone.
microsoft store: failed to compete with apple store and was rolled into best buy as a kiosk
microsoft surface: failed to compete with iPad or android.
Bing: failed to compete with either google or yahoo despite being based on code bought from yahoo.
Azure: failed to compete with aws/ec3/rackspace.
so yeah. i dont think salesforce is as terrified as they would have been say, 30 years ago when a microsoft embrace/extend/extinguish strategy basically spelled bankruptcy. This is a new redmond, and with it comes moronic decisions like buying Minecraft after it has no further growth potential, and porting random linux applications like SSH to windows.

Re:given their track record, i doubt it.

[Major Blud]

I'd be hesitant to call Azure a failure....it's above Google in market share and isn't that far behind Amazon:
https://www.skyhighnetworks.co...

I'm not sure that Surface was ever geared to be a direct competitor with iOS or Android given it's price point. Surface RT maybe a failure, given that MS pulled the plug on it, but in general it's been a success:
http://pocketnow.com/2016/02/0...

Re:given their track record, i doubt it.

[freeze128]

Microsoft store - I was just at the Mall of America, and the Microsoft store is JUST FINE.

Oh wait. Did you mean the Microsoft store for buying apps on your windows device? That's fine too.

Re:given their track record, i doubt it.

[neilo_1701D]

Azure: failed to compete with aws/ec3/rackspace.

And yet we're seeing an uptick in Azure installations for Dynamics 365 for both new clients and existing AX2012 clients.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "compete", but Azure has already become a critical piece for many, many companies.

Re:given their track record, i doubt it.

[Paco103]

Those poor mothers. . . .

Re:given their track record, i doubt it.

[Billly Gates]

I bet the Surface has sold as many if not more Android tablets. They are quite popular outside of slashdot which seems to be in their own world.

Re:given their track record, i doubt it.

[BronsCon]

microsoft store: failed to compete with apple store and was rolled into best buy as a kiosk

Right next to the Apple kiosk in the Best Buy down the street from the mall with the Microsoft Store in it, which happens to be across from the Apple Store. In case you missed it, my point is that they both have both.

microsoft surface: failed to compete with iPad or android.

Mostly because it's not trying to; it runs a full desktop OS and is intended to replace desktop/laptop functionality on the low- to mid-end, with some useful tablet functionality mixed in. I don't use a Surface, myself, but I did just invest in a similar platform from Dell for my company; seems to be working well thus far.

Azure: failed to compete with aws/ec3/rackspace.

It's almost a completely different offering than the rest. Yes, there's some overlap in virtualized hosting and load balancing, but Azure does offer services the others do not, just as Amazon offers their own unique services; I'm not sure WTF ec3 is, I think you meant EC2, which is AWS, and Rackspace doesn't really offer anything unique of their own. In fairness, I thought like you do until I looked at Azure a month or so ago. While I wouldn't use it for all of my needs, I did find a place for some of what it offers (Azure AD and a handful of related services, for example) in my organization. Those are things I, quite simply, can not get from AWS/EC2 or Rackspace.

This is a new redmond, and with it comes moronic decisions like [...] porting random linux applications like SSH to windows.

SSH on Windows has been my primary use case for Cygwin for years, and I know I'm not alone in that. The fact that it's less random and more a full install of Ubuntu makes it all the more useful. Throw in XMing and, since Microsoft was actually responsive to complaints about things not working quite right early on, and fixed most of the issues in a single release, you can run most any CLI or GUI Linux application that you could run in a native Ubuntu install, right in Windows. I do wish they'd do something to make file sharing between Windows and Windows/Ubuntu a bit less completely-fuck-your-access-from-either-platform-y, but there are workarounds for that and the offering is still very much beta, so meh.

Everything else, though, you pretty much nailed.

Re:given their track record, i doubt it.

[thegarbz]

microsoft surface: failed to compete with iPad or android. ...
Azure: failed to compete with aws/ec3/rackspace

Nimbius failed to understand the point of some of Microsoft's products and thus thinks they failed even though they have been a roaring success.

Oh frabjous. . . .

[Salgak1]

. . . . now, instead of MANUALLY getting spammed for GenericCo's latest Miracle Product, now they'll systematize it.

LinkedIn will become even LESS useful to the typical professional. At this rate, it'll be all sales types and keyword-spamming recruiters in a few years. . .

Hint: not EVERY transaction or networking event has to be pointed towards sales or recruiting, but that does seem to be the way LinkedIn is developing. . .

Re:Oh frabjous. . . .

[Major Blud]

LinkedIn will become even LESS useful to the typical professional. At this rate, it'll be all sales types and keyword-spamming recruiters in a few years. . .

So, you mean even MORE useful to the typical professional?

Re:Salesforce? Linkin? What?

[Jhon]

"How about some background? Flash-forward? What is this about?"

Microsoft is more than just "windows".

Hope that helps.

Re:First of all.

[xevioso]

I don't know. They are certainly building a very nice tower in downtown SF, right near where I work. At the very least, 2 decades from now people will know of the Salesforce Tower, just as they know of the Transamerica Pyramid, and yet not know what either of those companies do.

So basically

[guruevi]

Microsoft purchased LinkedIn so it could take all it's contact information and sell them to their customers and they beat Salesforce to the punch doing it. Look at me playing the world's tiniest violin.

MS Press Release

[losfromla]

This was about as blatant a press release as I've ever seen. I guess slashdot has to whore itself out somehow to pay the bills. Aren't sponsored links supposed to be a different color so we know to avoid them?

linkedin now a phone, mail and email spam engine

[rubycodez]

Don't let Microsoft profit off you and give your contact info to phone, mail and email spammers, overwrite your linkedin account with nonsense, then drop it a few weeks later.

Re: First of all.

[fizzup]

Salesforce tracks sales opportunities, clients, contacts, products, prices, defects, competitive intelligence, product requests, sales tasks, and documents. It also offers an instant messaging application.

Salesforce helps maintain a consistent sales process. It has a reporting system that lets you analyze your pipeline and bookings. The reporting system is good for tracking current sales performance of individuals, product lines, and companies. It's good for evaluating the likelihood of meeting bookings targets in the current month, quarter, or year. In a business, it's important to track bookings because they are a leading indicator for future revenue and, to a lesser extent, costs. You can also use salesforce to help create sales forecasts and targets for future years.