(§2,1*) “TEN YEARS AGO,”
[*Excerpt from Section 2, Heading 1 of Exocapitalism: economies with absolutely
no limits (2025) by Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo]
... a user named SpikeTheCookie posted an absolute banger on r/salesforce:
What is Salesforce, really? I’m looking for a really good, effective way to describe Salesforce beyond, yeah, it’s a CRM, here are the features, blah, blah, blah explanation. This just sort of makes your eyes roll back in your head. ;-) What do you say that stops people cold, and they suddenly get it, they get the power and beautify [sic] of it, or the coolness of it. Is it too much to ask to go to a virtual cocktail party and tell people what you do, and have them say, “Oh, so you’re like a spy! Tell me more...” ;-)
Honestly, it’s a good question. What is Salesforce? If you haven’t heard of it, you might be surprised at how thoroughly encoded you are into Salesforce, little bits of your stuff splattered across an almost uncountable number of half-implemented, dusty instances (who you are, where you live, what you do, what you’ve bought, when you bought it, what you did with it).
Salesforce, abbreviated SFDC for ‘Salesforce Dot Com,’ eludes definitional tightness. It’s goopy; it’s sticky. SpikeTheCookie initially calls Salesforce a ‘CRM’ (a customer resource management tool),22 but its capacities as such are limited by design. In reality, a company wouldn’t just use Salesforce alone for customer resource management, but might instead build their actual ‘customer resource management’ solutions on top of SFDC, mobilizing another suite of third-party tools (e.g. Gainsight, Outreach) that interface with SFDC for necessary CRM functions like account-based task manage- ment or outbound communication. This incompleteness, the inability of SFDC to alone serve a categorical function, is very much the point.
So, if Salesforce is not entirely a CRM, but instead a kind of tool in a toolkit you might use to make a CRM, we might as well zoom all the way outward and use the broadest possible generic terminology for software and call SFDC a ‘platform.’
But the concept of the ‘platform’ is so swollen with scope creep – a platform could just mean a web service that hosts activity, or it could mean a development environment with which new workflows or software objects are architected and deployed, or it could be generalized into a medium through which through-going information receives some degree of translation or implantation. ‘Platform’ becomes a way of talking about things that connect other things, or as Nick Srnicek puts it, “digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to interact [; ...] intermediaries that bring together different users: customers, advertisers, service providers, producers, suppliers, and even physical objects.”23 That definition applies to the entire internet; that definition applies very literally to almost the entire contemporary software development world.
And is that even really what Salesforce is? Is Salesforce really about connecting a user base together, or allowing cross-functional teams within a business to work together, or creating some kind of plane of communication between internal objects and people and things?
Not really! Salesforce is closer to accounting software than it is to Decentraland,24 it’s closer to Microsoft Excel than it is to Steam or to the Unreal Engine.25
Regardless, given the ambivalence of the definition it might be easier to define a platform negatively: a platform is not a one-stop-shop, nor a terminal node within a series, nor is it necessarily just a social world-space26 within which things happen. A platform is not enough of anything on its own terms. You could instead think of a platform as a type of incompleteness,27 a kind of loose interstitiality, an expectation, as something that requires someone else28 to do something in order for it to fully render as a platform.
A platform is a vibe (longing).
In the case of SFDC, a platform is a nested bundle of software applications that behave in incomplete, platform-like ways (hungry for missed connections). Further, SFDC is both one and many platforms.
SFDC is huge and broad and fungal and gray in its samelike, mazelike sprawl. It consists of at least 15 ‘clouds,’ hosted service objects that hang somewhere between databases, analytics tools, communications tools, workflow management tools, even vaccine supply chain management tools. Each of these ‘clouds’ approaches one might call a ‘solution,’ another woozy industry euphemism somewhat interchangeable with ‘offering’ or ‘service’ that inscribes a degree of specific utility for a specific array of purposes.
For example, Salesforce’s Experience Cloud allows a business to “[b]uild customer journeys on a powerful digital experience platform,”29an array of resources inclusive to building a digital store (integrate with Shopify30 or Magento or Salesforce’s own Commerce Cloud), assembling together a helpdesk or an order support chatbot (integrating with Zendesk or Freshdesk or Intercom), or rigging up a “complete channel31 management solution”32 (for example, by integrating with Channeltivity, ChannelAdvisor, Impartner, Zift, or Salesforce’s own native PRM — partner resource management— solution).
There is a kind of hyperflexion here, where the thing we’re trying to define is so subordinated to not just relationality (a subordination to other things), but to relationalism (a subordination to the supple potentiality of relation) that it approaches a kind of true Deleuzian becoming.33 It’s incredibly gushy stuff, it’s porous and liquid, it twirls over itself and threads into braids.
But we can go deeper: this hyperflexion is powerfully and infinitely recursive. Salesforce does, quite literally, contain itself multiply. It folds and torques itself into extraordinarily compact dimensions.
SFDC, counted among the Borgesian maze of things that it is, is also an application marketplace.
For payment processing, for example, one can turn to the ‘Stripe for Salesforce Platform’ no-code applet available within the SFDC AppExchange.34 Stripe itself uses Salesforce35 for its own Customer Resource Management tooling. Stripe processes payments36 for Salesforce’s ontologically soft Digital 360 platform.
Twist.37
For contract signature and review, sample away from the menu at SFDC’s Customer 360: Docu- Sign Gen for Salesforce Billing or DocuSign Gen for Salesforce CPQ Plus or DocuSign CLM for Salesforce Field Service.38 Partnership gives way to co-constitution; SFDC and Docusign commin- gle their “joint customers”39 into a pool, Salesforce itself uses Docusign40 for its own internal document management.
Each of these reciprocal relations creates a new fractal surface: vendor + customer and customer + vendor, both compounded by their mutual integrability into the stack of a third party.
This relational circuitry goes all the way into the infrastructural level. SFDC does not really own its own servers.41 It instead leverages another complex object that behaves in platform-like ways: the dreadnought that is Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS mediates and rents access to servers, servers distributed within data centers, data centers that AWS is as likely to own as it is to lease.42
Salesforce’s partnership with AWS reads like another cryptogram of partial puzzle-piecing and marketing language and recursive revenue flows:
Salesforce moves to provide first-party support for Amazon Bedrock (available through the ‘Einstein Trust Layer,’ a privileged overlay of Salesforce’s application marketplace with respect to AI).43 Salesforce Data Cloud moves to provide first-party management tooling for the dizzying abundance of AWS storage and provenance toolchains. In turn, AWS provides first-party support for Salesforce tools on its own AWS Marketplace, and deeper in- tegrations with SFDC subcomponents like Tableau or Mulesoft (acquisitions made by SFDC for data visualization and integration management, respec- tively).44
The deeper the crease of the fold or the deeper the reciprocal mutual embedding (e.g. that between SFDC and Tableau), the greater the tendency for two nodes to collapse or absorb into one node. Mergers and acquisitions happen constantly, a wet market where hulking translucent beasts swap organs with each other for liquidity, or where freestanding, inchoate bodies are pulled in into endosymbiotic45 relations. Blobs accrete to titanic scales, at which point they either bud off with parthenogenetic thrust or become so dotted with advanced cancers that they cease to be recognizable as single blobs at all. Others just pop into puffs of spores.
Competition within this nested, partnered landscape – where organs are freely shared or exchanged between blobby bodies – is almost always partial (especially at scale).
Does Zendesk compete with Salesforce? Yes, but incompletely (more directly with Salesforce’s Service Cloud). Another behemoth, Hubspot, also incompletely competes with Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud. Both Zendesk and Hubspot boast first-party integrations with Salesforce, and both Zendesk and Hubspot also compete with each other, also incompletely.46
Competition within this space is always incomplete due to the diffuse character of the objects in play and to their structural incompletenesses as platforms. It’s hard to even situate this organ market as competitive, it’s a free-for-all of limitless organs. These translucent hulks simply reach through each other. Sometimes they get stuck and merge.
The 21st century acquisition has less to do with the construction of monopolies by saturating an addressable market, and more to do with a drive toward dedifferentiation. Nick Srnicek calls the endpoint of this drive the “convergence thesis: the tendency for different platform companies to become increasingly similar as they encroach upon the same market and data areas.”47 But while this convergence is interesting and noteworthy, it is the differential convergence that commands further attention — the almost universal dedifferentiation of the platform economy through scope creep, M&A, private equity playbooks, incomplete competition, and brand ambiguity. While Srnicek is correct that corporations tend to resemble each other at scale, they also tend to resemble… well… everything else?
Srnicek’s perspective on competition and M&A departs from ours a bit. In his more recent work, and in the consensus of many of his contemporaries,48 he seems to suggest that the platform economy had died,49 or at least it has ossified into consolidated megascale multinational corporations (MNCs) with monopolistic characteristics and dramatic organizational shifts toward centralization. This is the de facto leftist orientation against so-called ‘big tech,’50 in which a celebritized executive class is understood to have directed, univocal control over both the generalized marketplace and the generalized media through which social bodies are created and regulated.
We’re not sure. This perspective might overestimate the infrastructural integrity of these organizations and the clear univocity of their downstream impact. Despite the superficial characteristics, there exist such rich and chaotic interiorities to spaces like Alphabet that attributing concepts like hegemony or monopoly to these organizations feels incorrect. Certainly these companies own “the infrastructures of society,”51 but as each company lays claim to the world, the ownership of a world by a world, a world bloated with autonomous vestigial organs, a world pastiched from defined and discrete subworlds, a world that bears world-scale complexity, feels tautological. As every engineer knows – software, mechanical, architectural – every joint is also a brittleness.
But sure, Amazon is obviously a hegemonic object in online consumer retail (or, rather, meta-retail).52 In September 2023, the Federal Trade Commission filed an (ongoing, but heavily amended) antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, accusing the company of illegally maintaining a monopoly in online retail.53 As Amazon approaches monopolistic54 gigantism, its girth dilutes its proposition as a singular object.55 While the Amazon we know exists as a logistics and fulfilment company, its core business is massively diffracted:
... not only does it contain Amazon Marketplace (which is fundamentally a software56 business unit), but also Amazon Prime (licensing and content hosting), Amazon Advertising, a fintech division (Amazon Pay and Amazon Catalytic Capital), a pharmacy (PillPack from Amazon Pharmacy), a full consumer electronics division (Lab126), physical stores, and – crucial to our discussion here – Amazon Web Services (the hosting platform for SFDC).
AWS itself can feel like a monopoly; it has monopoly vibes. While it is certainly the leader in the ‘rent-seeking on cloud compute’ business, it still controls a minority of the market.57 And, meaningfully, its competitors are similarly enormous: Microsoft’s Azure platform, Google’s GCP, Oracle’s Oracle Cloud Platform (all gooey side projects, like AWS, of other big things). Again the incomplete- ness of this competitive58 field rises to the surface — Azure is perhaps the most like-for-like competitor in terms of features and target market, but the parent organizations in play are starkly different.
AWS has a ton of things inside of it: services, functions, operational capacities, tools. Using AWS (deploying software on AWS) is, much like Salesforce, a combinatorial exercise wherein a user hen-picks from a mind-boggling lattice of modules, arranging them into a flow.
Just need compute? Try AWS EC2, Lambda, or Elastic Beanstalk. If you need storage, there’s AWS S3, EBS, Glacier, or the RDS, DynamoDB, or Redshift. Devtools? AWS CodeCommit, CodeBuild, or CodePipeline, Integration? SQS or SNS. ML? SageMaker, GreenGrass, Bedrock, DeepLens, or Comprehend. Analytics? Kinesis, Glue, or QuickSight. Business applications?Amazon Connect, Pinpoint, Workspaces, Chime, WorkDocs.
Like Salesforce, AWS’s product is a sprawling59 and dedifferentiated splat of slippery nodules or cysts, from which entire product and engineering departments spin agile epics around flowcharting into spidery, Flusserian ‘technical images.’60 AWS and Amazon, by virtue of their platformlike-ness, fundamentally differ from traditionally-conceived monopolies like Standard Oil or U.S. Steel. Not only do these platform monopolies lack a kind of monolithic rigidity by virtue of their expansive stacks, they also seem to overlap across each other, they sit in all kinds of superpositions across a massively dimensional market ecology.
Endnotes
22 A CRM is essentially a tool that business uses to store information about its customers (who works at a company, what they do, what is their contact information) and then action that information to make sales forecasts, send out marketing materials, track a business opportunity, etc...
23 Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism. Polity Press, 2017, p. 30. We prefer Benjamin Bratton’s definition from The Stack, though it’s abstract enough to be somewhat low-utility: “Platforms are what platforms do. They pull things together into temporary higher order aggregations and, in principle, add value both to what is brought into the platform and to the platform itself. They can be a physical technical apparatus or an alphanumeric system; they can be software or hardware, or various combinations.” Bratton, Benjamin H. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. MIT Press, 2016, p. 41.
24 The Metaverse’s iconically empty city square.
25 Video game platforms: Steam is a delivery platform and Unreal is a game development platform.
26 While the theory world loves to conflate ‘platforms’ and ‘social media platforms,’ the latter is a relatively tiny subset of the former.
27 Google insists that they are not a platform, because: “Google does not aspire to be just another platform like other platform players are, like: Microsoft on its PC software platform, Apple on its device platforms, Amazon on its retail platform, or Facebook on its social platform. Google CEO Larry Page goobristically[sic, lol] aspires for Google to be the Internet world and default web foundation to which all other platforms must adapt.” Cleland, Scott. “Why Google’s Not a Platform.” Forbes, 19 Oct. 2011. [http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottcleland/2011/10/19/why-googles-not-a-platform/]
28 Think about the Game as a Service platform, like Roblox, which is technically a game, but also a social media platform, an abstract marketplace, and (most importantly) a vehicle for user-generated content, specifically games built atop Roblox’s infrastructure. The expectation of Roblox is that it is incomplete on its surface, it encourages both hosted activity but also development activity atop its technical surface.
29 “Experience Cloud Overview.” Salesforce, Salesforce.com. [http://www.salesforce.com/products/experience-cloud/overview/]
30 Integrations boom in application marketplaces on both Salesforce and Shopify, for example: “Sync Made Easy.” Salesforce App Exchange, Salesforce.com. [https://apps.shopify.com/salesforce-sync] – or “Salesforce Sync.” Shopify App Store, Shopify.com. [https://apps.shopify.com/salesforce-sync]
31 Another industry euphemism: ‘channel’ typically means ‘partner,’ e.g. a co-marketing partner.
32 (Experience Cloud Overview).
33 i.e. instead of ‘being’ (a fixed ontological position), ‘becoming’ (a never-ending, dynamic transition): a thing can be defined less by what it is and rather by the way that it changes.
34 “Stripe for Salesforce.” Salesforce App Exchange, Salesforce.com. [https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=4dff0f8e-0b10-47c2-a3a3-f3905e7f7927]
35 Disclosed by employees during interviews for this book.
36 Bhattacharya, Megha. “Stripe Powers Salesforce’s Digital 360; Strikes Commercial Partnership.” IBS Intelligence, 25 Sept. 2020. [http://ibsintelligence.com/ibsi-news/stripe-powers-salesforces-digital-360-strikes-commercial-partnership/]
37 e.g. “the coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill” – Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October, vol. 59, Winter 1992, pp. 3–7. The MIT Press. p. 7.
38 “Salesforce and DocuSign Team up to Enable Contract Collaboration.” Salesforce Newsroom, 27 Oct. 2021. [http://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2021/10/27/salesforce-and-docusign-team-up-to-enable-contract-collaboration/]
39 (Salesforce and DocuSign, quote from Scott Olrich, COO, DocuSign).
40 “Salesforce.” StackShare. [http://stackshare.io/salesforce/salesforce]
41 Ten years ago, SFDC was entirely self-hosted, with “data stored in only ten databases that run on about 50 servers” as recently as 2009 – Arrington, Michael. “The Efficient Cloud: All of Salesforce Runs on Only 1,000 Servers.” TechCrunch, 23 Mar. 2009. [http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/23/the-efficient-cloud-all-of-salesforce-runs-on-only-1000-servers/] – this is absolutely no longer the case; “running in public cloud makes deep sense for Salesforce…” The elasticity of public cloud allows them to dynamically scale resources and ensures data residency compliance across regions – Salesforce Engineering. “The Unified Infrastructure Platform Behind Salesforce Hyperforce.” Salesforce Engineering Blog, 21 Jan. 2021. [https://engineering.salesforce.com/the-unified-infrastructure-platform-behind-salesforce-hyperforce-ad8f4c2cf789/]
42 It is known that more than half of AWS’s physical footprint is leased, but information on how much of AWS compute is run on their own physical infrastructure is not public – Edgecliffe-Johnson, Andrew. “AWS Owned 177M Sq Ft of Property, Leased 204M Sq Ft in 2023.” Data Center Dynamics. [http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/aws-owned-177m-sq-ft-of-property-leased-204m-sq-ft-in-2023/]
43 “Salesforce and AWS Partner to Bring AI to Dreamforce.” Salesforce Newsroom. [http://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/salesforce-aws-ai-announcement-dreamforce/]
44 “Salesforce and AWS Expand Strategic Partnership with Data and AI Enhancements.” Salesforce Newsroom. [http://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2023/11/27/aws-data-ai-strategic-partnership-expansion/#:~:text=As%20part%20of%20this%20partnership,regional%20support%20planned%20for%202024]
45 Luciana Parisi so elegantly describes endosymbiosis in non-metaphorical terms in Abstract Sex: “The endosymbiotic stratification of sex, however, challenges this constant cycle of life and death drives (the linear flow from inorganic to organic, simple to complex). The symbiotic folding of inorganic masses of bacteria in the organic smaller and polarized genetic chromosomes in the eukaryotic cell constitutes meiotic sex as a machine that envelops while being enveloped by inorganic soma. Somatic death does not indicate regression of organic life towards inorganic dissolution. Rather, the emergence of cellular death is linked to the molar (nucleic) organization of bacterial bodies in the eukaryotic cell introducing a cancerous metastasis in the lineage through the duplication of the nucleus.” Parisi, Luciana. Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire. Continuum, 2004, p. 77.
46 “Zendesk vs HubSpot.” Zendesk. [http://www.zendesk.com/service/comparison/zendesk-vs-hubspot/]
47 (Platform Capitalism, p. 62).
48 e.g. Yanis Varoufakis (Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism? Bodley Head, 2023.) or Slavoj Žižek (e.g. referencing Varoufakis here – “Global Capitalism Is Fueling War and Conflict.” Project Syndicate, 9 Sept. 2024). [http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/global-capitalism-fueling-war-conflict-sudan-congo-libya-elsewhere-by-slavoj-zizek-2024-09]
49 Uncharitably cherry-picking from both Platform Capitalism, but especially from his absolutely excellent interview with Joshua Citarella – Srnicek, Nick. “Platform Capitalism.” Joshua Citarella Podcast, 1 May 2022. [http://www.listennotes.com/c/3086e7651044488c96fd1e9a844fce73/]
50 e.g. Shoshanna Zuboff in TIME: “The giants and their ecosystems now own all the data about all the people, the data science and the scientists, the cables, computers, and clouds. They control the global market in knowledge production known as artificial intelligence and machine learning. They decide what becomes knowledge, who knows it, and to what purpose.” “Democracy Can Still End Big Tech’s Dominance Over Our Lives.” TIME Magazine. 5 May 2022.
51 (Platform Capitalism, p. 50).
52 A marketplace for sellers.
53 e.g. Day, Matt. “FTC Antitrust Lawsuit Against Amazon Will Proceed; Some Claims Dropped.” The Seattle Times, 30 Oct. 2024. [http://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/ftc-antitrust-lawsuit-against-amazon-will-proceed-some-claims-dropped/#:~:text=The%20FTC%20and%2017%20state]
54 Corey Doctorow argues, channeling Yanis Varoufakis, that Amazon’s Marketplace is a post-capitalist object, functioning as ‘owned land’ that renters pay to use. In this sense, Amazon literally becomes a world, with all the diffraction therein entailed. Doctorow, Cory. “Managerial Discretion and Junk Fees.” Medium, 1 Mar. 2024. [http://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-03-01-managerial-discretion-junk-fees-c599c3a3439c]
55 This is not just us being poetic, but literally the rhetorical path Amazon takes to undermine the FTC’s monopoly charges. (Managerial Discretion and Junk Fees).
56 “[T]he largest, fastest growing and most profitable part of Amazon’s retail operations is its Marketplace. Here Amazon owns no inventory and receives a fat fee on the nearly $400 billion in GMV (gross merchandise value) it helps sell.” Dennis, Steven. “What We Get So Very Wrong About Amazon’s Retail Profitability.” Forbes, 7 Feb. 2022. [http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevendennis/2022/02/07/what-we-get-so-very-wrong-about-amazons-retail-profitability/]
57 e.g. Sorrentino, Alexandra. “Cloud Market Share in Q2: Microsoft Drops, Google Gains, AWS Remains Leader.” CRN, 2024. [http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/2024/cloud-market-share-in-q2-microsoft-drops-google-gains-aws-remains-leader]
58 Alibaba and Alibaba Cloud is the most like-for-like comparison with Amazon and AWS, but is a largely a regionally-demarcated alternative.
59 “Amazon Web Services Products and Services Overview.” Amazon Web Services. [http://aws.amazon.com/products/]
60 From Caroline Busta: “But we textual humans, so Flusser argues, are now living in a world organized not by text but by these technical images, which is to say media that compresses reality via processes we do not fully understand. According to this idea, we now predominantly transmit information in ways that exceed the limits of alphabetic code, and we gained this ability so rapidly that we are civilizationally unprepared to absorb the shift.” Busta, Caroline. “Hallucinating Sense in the Era of Infinity-Content.” Document Journal, 29 May 2024. [http://www.documentjournal.com/2024/05/technical-images-film01-angelicism-art-showtime-true-detective-shein/]