Rename All The Things

Salesforce.com becomes Salesforce, Inc.

Salesforce

The biggest Salesforce news of the last month or so is the legal name change from Salesforce.com to just Salesforce. although it’s slightly disappointing that they didn’t introduce another, oddly named, company higher in the structure in line with Alphabet and Meta. Personally I’m surprised it’s taken this long - the .com suffix has felt a bit dated for some time, but I guess it’s referenced all over the place so isn’t easy to change. Probably the reason that we still have Carphone Warehouse in the UK, when nobody has used a car phone for about a decade!

A candidate for most poorly received rebranding surfaced in early April, as Pardot was renamed Marketing Cloud Account Engagement as part of a change to the entire marketing product suite. There was clearly an expectation of pushback before the change became public, as very few Salesforce communications include apologetic sections titled ‘Embracing change, even when it’s hard’ - at least it didn’t come as a surprise to them! For me, there’s an Apple influence on some of the names - Personalization, Engagement, Intelligence have more than a hint of Pages, Numbers and Keynote about them.

It’s not been all plain sailing for Salesforce internally either, with what is being termed an ‘employee revolt’ over the announcement of NFT Cloud. Marc Benioff reportedly owns a Cool Cats NFT, so maybe that’s why he can see a home for the tech in enterprise software that is eluding the rest of us. There has also been some turmoil over counting the Republican National Committee as a customer, although this appears to be far lower key than the NFT response.

Salesforce has paid out lots of bug bounty money - nearly $3 million last year alone. Much better use of money than trying to recover from exploits and, given the current state of the world, likely to increase in 2022 in my view.

And a couple of items that aren’t really about the business of Salesforce, but are still interesting:

• For those intrigued by/jealous of Trailblazer Ranch, Forbes has a good article about the history.

• You can also find out what Marc Benioff learned as a teenaged intern at Apple, which includes the endearing quote that “Kawasaki hired Benioff to write 70 coding language programs” - maybe explaining why Benioff is now pushing programs created using Flow that don’t require a coding language. Or not a text based one anyway.

There was another problem with Slack in late Feb - read the Register’s unique (as always) take on it.

Other

Elon Musk was joining Twitter’s board after becoming its biggest shareholder. Now he’s not, and as the Verge put it “you can know you’re dealing with a top-tier chaos muppet and still find yourself unprepared for the next turn of events.” And just as I was about to hit publish, he’s offered to buy it for $41 billion.

Facebook employees are now Metamates (I can’t help but read that term in an Australian accent for some reason), removing the need for any new letters to be used after the rebrand to Meta. Expect more of this - Meat, Team, Tame, so many options to rearrange four characters.

Open source is both forging ahead and giving pause for thought, as more companies make use of it and then worry about scaling, maintenance and security.

Me

A couple of updates to the Org Documentor, first adding flows and some basic order of execution coverage, and then adding duplicate rules into the order of execution output.

I also went back to basics on Lightning Web Components with a post on the behaviour of getters and setters and contrasting with Aura. I really want to do more of these, but as always it’s finding the time.