> "Every match is already sold out," Fifa president Gianni Infantino said in February. "We keep some tickets back for some last-minute sales, of course, but every match is sold out."
> Like most things about this World Cup, the reality appears to be different.
> Fifa should not have a problem selling out the games featuring the marquee teams - Argentina, Brazil, England, Germany and Spain, to name a few.
> We should be able to say the same about the host nations, but Fifa has priced these games so highly that only two of the nine matches featuring Canada, Mexico or the United States are officially sold out.
> on Saturday there were close to 74,000 tickets available across 86 of the 104 matches.
FIFA has switched to "variable pricing" under Infantino. Ticketmaster's just riding his coattails.
> It is going to price out most people.
Pretty much. I guess FIFA just figured they'd make more money milking the already rich. They must've seen the Superbowl finals performance and figured that broligarchs will pay those rates.
Curious what did you move them into from SF? SF is usually treated as this infallible perfect piece of software by non-tech folks, especially those looking to pad their resumes.
I worked at SugarCRM for years. It's often easier than one suspects once you figured out what a customer pain points are and show them a less burdensome solve. Most businesses do not need the kitchen sink approach of SFDC or SAP, they just have rarely had that demo'd to them.
Do _you_ know what three easy replacements are? If no, how do you know those people are looking to pad their resumes, did you figure that out from your non-SF conversations?
SF has worked very hard to cultivate that reputation, and at the end of the day they're mostly an overpriced application host. Once you communicate to the stakeholders that what they have in SF is just another application, and not actually "special", the conversations become a lot easier to have. They feel like Salesforce has them over a barrel at renewal time and helping them understand they CAN move makes a lot of conversations happen.
The answer to what have I switched people to is at the end of this post.
One company was using SF as a patient management system because their EMR wasn't set up right. They spent 6 figures a year on SF just to communicate with patients, make and change appointments, send and receive documents, record insurance information, etc. I spend 2 months fixing the EMR and they moved everyone to that, canceled, SF, and saved $200k/yr on SF and another $250k/yr on SF consultants. For a $50m/yr business, that's a lot.
Another was using SF as a ticket system. Those folks we moved to FreshService. $180k down to $15k/yr. From my experience, ticket systems tend to be one of the most common existing applications that get duplicated inside SF. People think they have to build it in SF rather than just linking your apps. There was another company who kept SF for their CRM aspects but we moved them to an external ticket system that linked to SF and cut their SF bill from $550/yr to $270/yr.
Then there have been cases where I'm brought in while in the middle of a development project. One of my favorites was this consulting firm said they could do all these things and integrate their EMR and Salesforce and that they had done it before with their custom middleware. But every month there'd be a new change-order from them where they said certain things weren't possible, and it came with an invoice! They were CHARGING this company to reduce the scope of an approved, signed, paid contract. I jumped in and said, "we're not paying any of these change orders, you don't get to charge us to do less work. You promised all these features, you said your software ALREADY DID them. What's the problem?" Then for two months we went round and round where I was able to offer them methods to do every single feature they said wasn't possible, and then they'd invent another reason they couldn't do it. I said we're done, canceling the contract, not paying any open invoices, not paying the remainder of the invoice, and in exchange I wouldn't recommend we sue them to get back everything we paid so far. Their own lawyer agreed, and we parted ways. They had us sign a Salesforce contract before we even paid them, so we were a year into a 3 years salesforce contract and literally nothing had been built out. By this time it turns out I had a reputation in the salesforce finance department, so it didn't take a lot of arguing to get them to offer a 50% reduction in exchange for paying off the contract immediately and canceling it.
What they get moved to depends on what they actually need. 50% of the time it's not a CRM at all but a more appropriate app like an EMR, ticket system, ERP, scheduling apps, invocing solutions for existing accounting apps, etc.
The rest of the time it'll be to CRMs and marketing tools that already exist, or custom extensions/connectors to their apps or a way to link their apps and a CRM. I've moved folks to Monday, Nutshell, Hubspot (who I don't like either but they're better than SF), a dozen others.
I haven't dealt with a company yet that couldn't move to a cheaper alternative with no loss in functionality. If execs have emotional ties to SF then I can't do anything. I had one client, the sales VP shot down a conversion because he liked being able to say "we run on Salesforce!" Literally. he liked being able to brag they could afford Salesforce. I just left that one alone.
> I had one client, the sales VP shot down a conversion because he liked being able to say "we run on Salesforce!" Literally. he liked being able to brag they could afford Salesforce. I just left that one alone.
Unfortunately this is what I meant by the braggarts and resume padders. It's usually only after these people leave that the company takes a serious look at their books and then decide that they want to move away from SF.
Salesforce is the most bloated piece of any software I've ever seen, and I've seen Azure. Apples and oranges, yes, but Azure is far more navigable than Salesforce.
Once when planning to buy some property, I watched for 10 minutes as the real estate sales agent painstakingly took about 10 minutes to navigate through and book an apartment for me. Enough time for me to start second-guessing about buying the property. Had SF been faster, I would've been stuck with some really illiquid shit.
Applies for most of Europe too imo. Major exception being Switzerland and by God does this tiny country punch over its own weight. Right across my office we have pharma and biotech labs, hedge fund headquarters and family offices, farmland, advanced machinery companies, chemicals factories, crypto and AI startups, ski resorts and lake hotels, all located on a 240 km2 patch of land.
It's much easier to start up a company in the US than it is in any part of Europe.
They not only encourage innovation but also cross-pollination too. So say you discovered some minor technology, they'll even help you connect with other folks who work in the space, potentially combine the innovations together to create a new final product that can actually be licensed to OEMs.
Where I find China lacking is in creativity and imagination. Yes, there are some changes in that front happening, but you'll never find OpenAI, Helion Energy or SpaceX being founded in China. Those projects won't even get the greenlight from the CCP to get started off the ground because of their high capital and startup costs.
Counterpoint on China - they will import special talent and help them immigrate. And of course, there are people who'll value the lifestyle of Shenzhen over San Francisco, or Shanghai over New York. One example that comes to mind is Dr. Erdal Arikan.
Most foreigners don't really want citizenship and are content being expats. The ones who do want citizenship are often from countries with weak passports, which often means weak infrastructure, poor HDIs and usually not that much of a skillset that they can bring to the table.
Please don't give credit for current Ukrainian advances to the Trumpenreich. The US intelligence apparatus was apparently even sharing NATO intelligence and information with Russia on Ukrainian positions. Once the EU excluded the US completely from this, Ukraine has made much more progress recently.
The entire Shia sect is basically an apocalyptic religious movement. Has been since the start when Ali, the first Imam and fourth Caliph for the Sunnis, was assassinated, his sons following him, only for the assassination mastermind to usurp his Caliphate. Combine that with the millenarianism of the Safavids in the 15th and 16th centuries.
> entire Shia sect is basically an apocalyptic religious movement
This seems incredible? Like, apocalypitc evangelists have practically never built a proper civilisation. Shia Islam has golden-age Islam to its credit.
Not really. It is to be noted that Shiism for the most part was a very fringe sect for most of history. Even in Iran and Iraq, their traditional strongholds today, Shiism didn't have a strong enough presence until the reign of Shah Ismail Safavid, the first Safavid emperor who also hailed from a distinguished religious order called the Safawiyyah. In fact, the Safawiyyah were originally a Sunni military order based out of Azerbaijan, before converting to Shiism, and under his reign began a mass conversion campaign across his Iranian empire to force convert Sunnis to Shiism.
When Shiism took root in Iran, they enjoyed favor with Persian culture, which has always been a strongly defensive culture which has had to fight against multiple threats throughout its history. Persian culture has always had this "us vs the others" mentality, in which Shiism fit perfectly as a fringe movement.
Even then, most Shiites didn't take Shia practices or even Islamic practices seriously - many just continued their previous traditions as is. Even today, there are Shias who visit Zoroastrian fire temples and pray there, or depict imagery of Muhammad with fires around his head - something that would be blasphemous in Sunni Islam.
Had Ismail Safavid's conversion campaign not have happened, Shiism would have been just another fringe sect like Ibadism, the predominant sect in Oman which comprises less than 0.5% of the global Islamic population (3 million members).
Don't forget the part where the Lebanon ceasefire was announced, Israel decided to continue its bombing and occupation campaign and broke the ceasefire, then Trump immediately announced the blockade stays in that TS rant.
Technically Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel first on March 2nd and Israel responded… then Israel repeatedly bullshitted some ceasefires to keep the US placated while they simultaneously ramping up both a ground invasion and air campaign. Hezbollah equally is no doubt being pushed hard to keep fighting by Iran.
Israel is definitely showing they are a bad partner to the US and should be the more responsible one (nobody expects much from Hezbollah which Iran just selfishly exploits). But Netanyahu seems to want to burn everything to the ground while he still can since he knows his career is already over.
Pretty much all of shi'a Lebanon has been occupied and Israel has publicly stated their plan is to turn it into Gaza. Dunno if Hezbollah needs encouragement from anyone else at this point.
Israel broke the ceasefire first by continuing to occupy the Bekaa valley and Lebanese land all the way up to the Litani river. When they showed no signs of leaving, Iran said that Israel's breaking the ceasefire and that's when mango Mussolini announced the blockade.
Iran can't even tell Hezbollah to stand down because the group was already extremely weakened after the October 7 war and the death of Haniyeh.
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