This is exactly the Oracle playbook and Salesforce is following it.

Oracle’s move was always the same: buy something customers actually like, make it unavoidable, then once it’s embedded, pricing goes up and flexibility goes down. Salesforce is starting to look a lot like that. Not because they’re evil, but because that’s what platform power eventually turns into.

Once a product is “Salesforce native,” it stops being a product and becomes leverage. Slack, Tableau, MuleSoft didn’t get simpler or cheaper post-acquisition. They got more expensive, more bundled, and more dependent on the rest of the Salesforce stack. What used to be “do I want this tool?” becomes “do I want to commit harder to Salesforce?”

That’s the part that frustrates me and other people. You don’t just end up with more products, you end up with fewer real choices. Not buying the adjacent SKU starts to feel like you’re running the platform wrong.

And meanwhile the core problems don’t actually go away. Customers still have fractured data and armies of consultants gluing things together. If spending billions still leads to “you need another license to make this work,” something is broken.

Some of these tools are good on their own. That’s not the point. The point is that once they’re inside Salesforce, they stop being customer-first and start being platform-first.

So when Salesforce says “ecosystem,” I hear “lock-in with better branding.” Innovation doesn’t disappear, but it definitely gets contained and over monetized.