That makes it 50 billion $ overpriced.

If the damn thing has never made 1 cent of profits, how the hell is it valued at 50 billion $?

I think alot of this cloud crap is highly overrated.

I think MS is better off not tossing all that cash out the window.

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. 

"you guys must be young", "massive in corporate america" Really, what kind of reasoning is that? Everyone outside corporate america is young?

I expect salesforce bubble to burst within 5 years. Sooner or later people will want to see some of their investments back, and if other cloud solutions prove to be better, they'll abandon them.

to be a part of corp america you need a job which means you are at least 22 years old. i don't expect many high school/college age people will have heard of salesforce. 

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.

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.