Do You Recognize This Salesforce?

Posted on April 23, 2024  (Last modified on December 10, 2024) • 3 min read • 616 words

Part 4: 2016–2020.

It’s Part 4 of our look at how the leading CRM’s homepage has changed over the years, and we’re almost all caught up to “today”! In this round we’ll be going from 2016 to 2020! Courtesy of the Internet Archive, we’ve been going year by year and looking at the corporate, cosmetic, and product copy updates Salesforce has made to their “home address” over time.

You can of course catch the previous posts right here: Part 1, 1999–2005 | Part 2, 2006–2010 | Part 3, 2011–2015

Now let’s dive in!

2016  

Wow! 2016 is both a huge change from where we started way back in 1999 (the hero imagery is now massive, the text is minimal, we’ve dropped the product suffix-es completely on the homepage) but 2016 also has some surprising similarities (for one, the return to the super “short” page with minimal scrolling required)!

There’s also some weirdness in 2016 in terms of archival (which is likely the result of some code aging out of relevance). For these posts, we’ve been trying to take screenshots from June or July of every year, so it’d be a nice snapshot of the midway point, but for 2016 we had to go as early as March because June and July all seem to only load the header and footer.

Also worth noting in 2016 — we’ve adapted from explaining “what is CRM” to “What is Salesforce?”.

A.k.a. the annual holiday dinner question. Eagle-eyed Trailblazers will also note Dreamforce getting some permanent footer real estate, the AppExchange being expanded to include consultants and components, and a new explainer on cloud computing.

And, perhaps most surprisingly — a continued commitment to Google+.

2017  

2017 unfortunately, for the entire year it seems, suffers from the unarchive-able bug we saw in late 2016. If any archive experts out there know a way around it, please do let us know! But, even with what little we can see, there’s a lot here that feels familiar!

The addition of the live chat pop-forward.

The still-current login button and icon in the top right!

And our product dropdowns (which would seem to suggest they’ve been removed form the page itself to now live in the navbar)! And, of course, a continued commitment to Google+.

2018  

2018 unfortunately suffers a similar fate. Here we are, all the way in December of 2018, and still can’t seem to find a page to load correctly on the internet archive :(. What we do see however, is an even more expansive product offering!

Now we’ve got Engagement, Integration, Communities, Analytics and more!

We also have the return of “What is CRM?” alongside “Why Salesforce?” and “What is Cloud Computing”? And, perhaps most surprising of all!

We have officially given up on Google+!

2019 + 2020  

Ok, for some reason 2019 and 2020 also suffer from the archive blackout — so this series may turn into more of a Scooby Doo situation moving forward.

For some reason however, the German language version of 2019’s site loads just fine!

At least we got our first Einstein sighting! And, while 2020 also fails to load, it’s (unfortunately) easy to tell the year has turned over when we see the COVID-19 on the nav bar.

2021–2024?  

Will be coming up next UNLESS we can figure out a way to load the late 20-teens correctly! What are we missing?! What are they hiding?! What should we try?!

Seriously, if you have any ideas about how to overcome the archive gap please let us know — we’re dying to see and share those pages! And until next time, keep working hard, smart, and happy. We’ll see you in the cloud.