So apparently half of Silicon Valley (and Redmond, and who knows where else) spent Friday afternoon speculating about who's going to buy Salesforce. The reports started with Bloomberg and got picked up everywhere by end of day: Salesforce has brought on a financial adviser after getting takeover interest, Microsoft's name is in there, and the stock popped something like 12-13% in a single session. For a company that size, that's not a small move. That's the kind of jump that makes people who've never thought about enterprise CRM software in their life suddenly have opinions about it.
I have thought about it. Too much, honestly. For about eight months in 2012 I had a job where my entire day revolved around Salesforce, and I want to be clear that this is not a nostalgic post.
The company I worked for had customized their instance so many times, by so many different consultants over so many years, that nobody left on staff actually understood how half the fields worked anymore. There was a dropdown for lead status that had eleven options and at least four of them meant basically the same thing depending on which sales rep you asked. I spent an embarrassing number of hours building reports that would just silently return zero rows because some required field three clicks deep had a typo in it from 2009. Not exaggerating on the "three clicks deep" part either, Salesforce has always had this talent for making a two-minute task take twenty minutes, and then making you feel like it's somehow your fault for not knowing the right workaround.
So when I saw the stock jump because of buyout chatter, my first reaction wasn't "wow, big tech drama," it was "God, imagine if Microsoft actually bought this thing and tried to cram it into Dynamics." Which, to be fair, might genuinely improve some of it. I don't hate the idea on principle. Microsoft's enterprise stuff isn't exactly beloved either, but at least Outlook integration might stop being an afterthought bolted on by a third party plugin that breaks every other update.
What I keep coming back to, though, is how weird it is that a rumor — not a deal, not even a formal process announcement, just "sources say they hired a banker" — is enough to move a company's value by billions of dollars in an afternoon. Marc Benioff hasn't said a word publicly as of today that I've seen. Nobody's confirmed anything. And yet the market just decided, in real time, that this was worth a double-digit percentage swing. I get why it works that way, I just think it's kind of funny to sit with for a second. A sentence in a Bloomberg article is worth more than most companies' entire annual revenue.
Anyway. I don't have inside information and I'm not going to pretend I do. I'll say this though: if you've ever had to migrate a company off Salesforce, or into it, you know the real cost of any acquisition isn't the purchase price, it's the six months afterward where nothing works right and everyone's opening support tickets about broken workflow rules. That part never makes the headlines. Nobody writes "Company X Completes Acquisition, IT Department Quietly Suffers For Two Quarters" but that's the actual story every single time one of these enterprise software companies changes hands.
If I'm being honest, my bigger question is whether this changes anything for the people actually using the product day to day, and my guess is no, not for a long while even if a deal happens. These things move slow. Integrations take years. The dropdown with eleven confusing options will probably still be there in 2018 no matter whose logo is on the login page.
Google I/O is next week too, which feels like it's going to eat all the tech news oxygen for a few days, so I figured I'd get this one down while it was still fresh. Not everything has to be about phones and Android versions.