Take your data, leave the business

In a discussion about lock-in, someone who runs Salesforce in their business told me that it was surprisingly open. And… they’ve got a point: your records export as CSV, the API will give you nice clean data. No format traps here.

So… you own the water.

But nobody runs a business on water, they run it on plumbing. It’s all the stuff built around it: custom objects, Apex code, workflow rules, page layouts, integrations… Years of institutional logic bolted into place that doesn’t leave when you do.

You can leave with all your data and still end up starting from zero. Because it wasn’t the rows in the tables that were running your business, it was the pipes.

That's the trick. They let you keep the water precisely because they know you can't take the plumbing.

Colin