Reading over Salesforce's latest fiscal results it's exciting to see the large revenue growth but what's more interesting is the expenses. Salesforce grossed close to 950 million in profits and spent 990 million in operating expenses in the last quarter but 65% of it's expenses were in marketing and sales. Salesforce is still a young company and is wisely spending money to grab as many customers as it can and get them embedded into their proprietary ecosystem. Right now the focus is brand awareness and making customers feel confident in their product. If you remove marketing cost, Salesforce is actually profitable.I'm a buyer of Salesforce for two reasons. One is the freeing of company data from in-house networks. At one point in time business was conducted on paper, something that you could take anywhere. Then computers came about and chained employees to a desk; however, with the explosion of smartphones/tablets and ubiquitous internet connectivity work can once again be conducted out of the office but the resources/cost needed to securely deliver this experience is out of reach for most companies to do themselves. Second is the continued abstraction of software. At one time developing software meant writing assembly code to modify bits on a computer. Then we moved to higher level natural language syntax and in the future software development can be as simple as drag and drop. Salesforce is just another iteration of this evolution. For the foreseeable future there will always be "software" companies like Microsoft/Salesforce who develop the tools but for any company whose business is not to sell software there really is no need to have a large development team.
