@jjeaff Of course they do development. They have software engineers and buy real software companies with software engineers. Someone needs to maintain all the software they keep integrating into their eco-system (some products which they acquire remain independent). But their business model is to expand by buying or investing in other companies. They don't invest in building new stuff in house. Partly because they don't really have the capabilities to build something like Slack for example that would dominate the market.

So do they really not do any development in house to speak of? Or do you just mean it isn't their core competency?

As a former employee (and not one acqui-hired) I don't know how you could say they're not a "software company", but I did say something similar during my time that I still stand by which is they're not really a "tech company" in the way Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon/Google/Apple are. They do have a few thousands of in-house devs working on "core" products, and lots of other devs from various large acquisitions (e.g. Heroku) mostly separated from that, there's a good deal of tech and some smart engineers, but I'd still call them a marketing or sales company instead. This distinction is mostly only relevant to programmers in that it describes and predicts an internal mindset for how problems are approached and how budgets are allocated. It's hard to describe without examples I don't really want to get in to, but as an illustration you could make an axis with one end being clearly a tech company like Facebook and the other being not a tech company like Walmart (despite Walmart having some impressive tech/smart engineers). Salesforce sits quite a bit further away from the tech end than people think.

they have many many software engineers this guy is lying