Platformonomics TGIF is a weekly roll-up of links, comments on those links, and perhaps a little too much tugging on my favorite threads.
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Who Remembers VMforce?
Salesforce modus operandi on full display: A breathless press release (albeit very light on product details)! A catchy video! TV appearances! Sweeping declarations: “The SaaSpocalypse is over!” I am certain the tchotchkes are world-class.
The stock is up, so the work is pretty much done. Just need to create the Claudeforce mascot! No need to bother the product teams.
In the video, they show integration via the existing Claude connector architecture. If I’m Anthropic, I love the idea of burning tokens every time someone wants to interact with Salesforce. But that doesn’t reflect well on what Salesforce has spent the last 25 years building above the (Oracle) database layer. Headless is an apt descriptor for Salesforce.
With VMforce, it took Salesforce nine months to confess they didn’t know how to deploy new software to their data centers.
Previous:
Heroku RIP, Dreamforce Evacuation Alert, Salesforce “is not a company in crisis”, You Can’t Spell Metallica Without A and I, Benioff’s Blizzard of Bluster: FOOM Edition, Salesforce is (Still) Not a Technology Company, Salesforce Holds “Developer” Conference, Salesforce is Not a Technology Company: Nor an AI Company, 2025 Will Not be the Year of Agentic AI, The Agentic Abyss of Disillusionment, Salesforce is Not a Technology Company: Nor a Dogfood Company, What’s Bugging Marc Benioff – Continued, Benioff’s Blizzard of Bluster, Salesforce + Indian Mystic + AI = ???, “There’s an art to this kind of horseshit, and Benioff is its Michelangelo”, Bluster, Bombast and Bullshit: Just Another Day at Salesforce, Salesforce’s Shamelessness is Staggering, Salesforce Gonna Salesforce, The Spectacle that is Dreamforce, The Hard Thing About “Hard Pivots”, Thought Leadership (in Mascots), Salesforce Rallies Its Deep Bench of AI Experts (and Cartoon Characters), SaaS Sprawl and the Potential for Market Consolidation, Slackforce and the Beginning of the End of SaaS Sprawl,
Antitrust Incoherence: A Footnote about a Historical Footnote
A delicious The Diff footnote on hipster antitrust (aka the neo-Brandeisians):
This is a little uncharitable to them, but in my defense I find almost everyone in that corner of the policy world surprisingly uninformed. They get excited about random gimmicks like publicly-owned grocery stores or price controls on beer at athletic events, and simply don’t engage in any kind of detailed discussion of how those policies might work and what the more efficient alternatives are. It is, in that world, very low-status to know what the typical profit margin of a grocery store is, and what the low- and high-margin products are. And that’s an especially big problem when the whole thrust of the neo-Brandeisian movement is that it’s okay to take antitrust actions that are currently harmful to consumers, as long as they’ll protect consumers from future harms. If you’re going to make that case, you need to absolutely obsess over how businesses work and how pricing evolves under different scenarios. Failing to do that, just announcing that big business makes you so mad you refuse to learn anything about it and also would like to be put in charge of it indefinitely, is just obnoxious. (It doesn’t help matters here that it appears to be a universal assumption in neo-Brandeisian circles that people who disagree with them are being paid to do so. Whereas an antitrust lawyer arguing that antitrust lawyers should be significantly more powerful is, of course, a neutral observer.)
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Software Migration Alert Revoked: PayPal
Even if private equity isn’t getting involved, PayPal is one where you might just do the migration anyway.