Mike’s Prediction Builder: Will Salesforce be Slacking Off at Dreamforce?

Posted on by Mike

Ok, hands up – who thought I was slacking off on the blog front? Well I’m back!

It looks like we accidentally created a Dreamforce mini-series here at Salesforce Weekly, when Chris kicked us off with “How to do Dreamforce Remotely”, followed up by Ines with “Get Involved and Speak” to coincide with the Dreamforce call for speakers – so what is left for me? Well, you know I’m not shy of making a prediction or two…

So let’s flash forward to Dreamforce 2018 and see if we can’t predict some more about how this year’s Dreamforce could shape up!

Vitality through Equality

Diversity, Inclusiveness and Equality themes will be as prominent as ever – like a beating heart, and one which is continuously giving the Salesforce Economy new lifeblood to help drive us forward into the fourth industrial revolution.

However, there’s a bit more to it than being a mere theme. It’s the not-so-secret sauce which keeps the Salesforce ecosystem alive. But like any ecosystem system, if you don’t continue to feed it, it will eventually retreat, and even die. (I think Peter Coffee once uttered words to that effect…)

Many successful people will tell you that culture and people trump technology, and that is really what the annual Dreamforce gathering is all about. It brings together people from all different walks of life, ages and demographics, providing them with an immersive learning experience and hopefully igniting a lifelong passion for learning which extends beyond Dreamforce.

Alright, alright, I admit it: that was an easy one… It’s so certain that it probably doesn’t even count as a prediction, but hey ho let’s see if we can step it up…

A new kid on the block?

OK, let’s pull the chain on this thread and see what could be causing a roadblock this year. That’s the cryptic clue as to where this post is heading next – so have you guessed it yet? If not, this may help:

At this moment in time, is this all simply toilet talk and mumbo jumbo, or is there any substance to it? Judging by a recent tweet from Mr Coffee, it’s about to go mainstream…

Yeah, OK, these aren’t predictions, they’re just tweets. So here is my prediction then about how this will manifest itself within the Salesforce Ecosystem.

If this truly is the future of computing and digital communication, then having it materialise as a paid add-on to Salesforce makes no sense, but instead what if it was a platform feature similar to Platform Events, with set of APIs for anyone to implement your own distributed ledger (that’s a blockchain by the way)? Surely if Peter’s statement has any weight you can’t build something like this and stick a price on it, would you?

Alright, maybe you don’t care about blockchains yet. So let’s pull the chain now on that one, and instead…

Let’s flash forward to Flow

Now, something a bit more fun. Lightning Flow, what’s the future there? Well they managed to get Flow Debugger in Summer ’18, but will they get the new non-Flash Cloud Flow Designer out by Dreamforce & Winter ’19?

Here’s what I think: no chance. Well, not for the general public. Maybe some automation champions have seen it, however at this point, I’m leaning towards this feature making it out “just-in-time” for the deprecation of Flash, which means they still have until 2020 to sort it out.

Building from scratch?

I’m still predicting more scratch orgs are on the horizon. At the moment I’m not sure if I dreamt this or read this – but scratch orgs are coming to developer orgs this year. At the moment you need a paid Enterprise Org or higher or a DX Trial Org to access the Dev Hub which is the necessary ingredient for spinning up Scratch Orgs. I predict more SFDX and Scratch Orgs – and stay tuned for a future post on SFDX as I’m knees-deep in Scratch Orgs and the DX CLI right now!

Absent friends

So Ines and I have legitimate reasons for not being at Dreamforce this year, but who else do we think is going to not be there?

That darling of the tech industry, Will.I.Am, is now part of the furniture at Dreamforce. So much so that my daughter often asks me whether he works at Salesforce. A part of me thinks he probably is on the payroll in some way, but could this be the year he takes a well-deserved year off?

Will two will become three?

Cast your mind back. We started out with Developers as being the core audience of Dreamforce. Then one became two – Developers and Admins. A part of me thinks there a bit of uprising thanks to the wonderful Gemma & Charly with their ever-growing LadiesBeArchitects movement and that there is almost certainly a new breed of aspiring Architects out there. So here is a question for you: are you a…?

 

a.) Developer

b.) Admin

c.) Architect

d.) All of the above

 

More and more of us now consider ourselves to be two or maybe even three of those. So I can maybe see there being an Architect Zone at DF18.

And finally… Will Salesforce slack off?

Our final one, then. Is Salesforce going to slack off completely this year, or will they ramp it up big time on the Acquisitions and Mergers front in time for Dreamforce?

Got it yet? I think I’ve dropped a ton of cryptic clues throughout that if you haven’t, then you’re in the wrong bubble!

One communication platform which is definitely not Slacking off is Slack. So could Salesforce buy Slack? This makes a ton of sense and much more sense than purchasing Twitter. And let’s be brutally honest, the competitors are on a spree at the moment. Microsoft purchasing Github was just the start and, honestly, nobody is using Microsoft Teams and Skype, so Salesforce is going to have to be quick if they want to grab Slack – like Dreamforce quick.

So there you have it, that’s what I think! How about you? What are your DF18 predictions?

 

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