> but Salesforce deliberately avoids competing with software/services in the partner ecosystem
It helps that Salesforce takes a huge slice from sales in the AppExchange.
This isn't entirely true, though. Salesforce does, at times, position itself against its own ecosystem. Their recent attempt at devops, no matter how feeble it is, directly competes against major players like Copado and Gearset. Mulesoft and some other ventures over the years should have theoretically relegated a huge multitude of sync apps to irrelevancy, if Salesforce had been able to execute better on them. They launched a payment system a couple of years ago that competes with some other top marketplace options. There are dozens of examples like this.
It helps that Salesforce takes a huge slice from sales in the AppExchange.
This isn't entirely true, though. Salesforce does, at times, position itself against its own ecosystem. Their recent attempt at devops, no matter how feeble it is, directly competes against major players like Copado and Gearset. Mulesoft and some other ventures over the years should have theoretically relegated a huge multitude of sync apps to irrelevancy, if Salesforce had been able to execute better on them. They launched a payment system a couple of years ago that competes with some other top marketplace options. There are dozens of examples like this.