With that money I'd buy Twitter, Netflix and Alibaba combined instead of a company that never turned profit and no one has ever heard of.

You could only buy the first two. Alibaba is worth over 200 billion.

Wow, where would I be without you?

to have a Monopoly in that field and be able to leverage whatever prices/products they want. when you have big direct competitors you have to cut margins and prices to 'get ahead' of the competition. obviously outright purchasing your rivals in certain fields will eliminate the competition but is always a big question mark on whether or not capitalizing on that market will ends up being worth it

frankly 70b seems nuts to me but, again, Microsoft wasn't likely interested in Salesforce for their business model but just to eliminate them and become dominant in the cloud computing market

ehhh at some point you do have to criticize a company for using insanely low margins to kill the competition. I appreciate the short term advantages it provides consumers, but in the long run it will just hurt the consumers. why? because while we get low prices from Amazon now, their competition (mostly storefront retailers, and other smaller online 1st and 3rd party stores) suffer and fail because they can't match said prices. eventually those businesses will die out from worse sales and then we will be left with only a few big retailers like Amazon. at the point in which an 'Amazon' does that they are then able to basically determine market prices on goods because of the limited competition. obviously Amazon is primarily targeting the online market but still

its similar to why Wal-mart gets a lot of heat. low prices are great, sure, but when you're literally selling some things so low that you LOSE MONEY as a company, simply to eliminate the competition, that's not really good business. and in the end it hurts the consumer because in capitalism the more competition there is the more reasonable the rates/prices. not a set rule obviously, as sometimes the quality of things will make higher prices appropriate depending

and when a Wal-mart (or its equivalent in any field) is paying its employees the absolute minimum or simply just manufacturing everything overseas for practical slave labor it begins to become both a short term ethical problem and a long term consumer-price problem that will bite back in the future

at any rate the same sort of applies with Microsoft, they obviously were considering purchasing Salesforce to become dominant in cloud services

Exactly. They don't need their services. Microsoft just wanted to dominate the market. If they acquired salesforce, they would have a 27% marketshare of all CRM. Even Oracle or SAP don't have all that marketshare. However paying 70 billion (or even 55 billion for that matter) is alot just to get barely over 1/4 of all CRM marketshare.

Well hey, in my country billion = 12 zeros, and I've seen people be confused by this before. That's why I said in case you actually were wondering, and not just dazzled by the huge amount of money it is.

really surprised so many are saying "a company no one has heard of".  you guys must be young because salesforce is massive in corporate america. 

and a company doesn't need to be profitable to be valuable.  you can run a company for profit or for growth,.. salesforce has been in growth mode and making massive strides in revenue and market penetration.  this is important because once a company transitions to profit mode a 1% profit margin on a billion in revenue is a lot more than 1% on a million in revenue. 

Just checking... but do you know what salesforce is... or what they do? 

In this thread i've seen several people sort of insinuate that salesforce is some form of cloud computing company because they say someone else mention the word "cloud".

Just to clear things up -- Salesforce is a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager). Its used to store customer data and all interactions between the customer and some point of contact within the company. It is also used to generate sales leads and follow up on these leads. Some companies also use it for additional uses.

Back to the Amazon piece -- they aren't the same as Walmart. Walmart sells crappy quality items for cheaper prices then competitors, or the same produce for practically the same price. Amazon on the otherhand aggegates multiple vendors into one sales list and lets the consumer see the cheapest price. In terms of books -- publishers got all rear-hurt because they were forced to lower the costs of digitial distribution; you know, the same thing everyone whines about with digital games?

Amazon is also innovative. Instead of simply being a retailer like walmart (with good profit margins), they are a retailer that has expanded into multiple different venues. Amazon is now THE leading cloud server company (Azure isn't as good), is a strong rival to apple in digital-good reselling, are creating new products such as Kindle, Kindle Fire, Fire Phone (fail i know), the Fire TV, and the Echo (we actually love our echo). Heck there are even rumors that amazon might enter the console market space. 

@sabvre42

Amazon is amasing. The robots they use in there warehouses.... just *insert mindblown gif here*.

Salesforce looks like its a usefull peice of software... but its just not nearly as impressive as seeing those warehouse videos of the robots at work.