For a smaller company, like Salesforce, with a market capitalization closer to $50 billion, 1% would only be $500 million—so Salesforce can afford only a tenth as much to hire engineers even though it has a third as many employees as Google. As a result, one analyst said to me that Salesforce would eventually have to be sold to a bigger company. This same analyst believed that this was ultimately the reason that LinkedIn was sold to Microsoft. They just weren’t big enough to be competitive as a stand-alone company in today’s market, he said.
