This seems to assume that the number of customers would stay steady if marketing costs drop to zero. That strikes me as implausible.<p>It&#x27;s sort of like saying, &quot;If we stop investing in R&amp;D and machine maintenance, our factory will be much more profitable.&quot; In an accounting sense, yes, sort of. But in reality, no, because you&#x27;re eating your seed corn.<p>I grant that Salesforce is still in a &quot;let&#x27;s buy market share&quot; mode, so we shouldn&#x27;t expect to see a profit. So they could be just growing happily. But they also could be in a highly competitive market without much competitive advantage. Or it could be that they are using marketing spending to boost revenues well beyond what&#x27;s sustainable. From the numbers, we can&#x27;t tell. Which, I believe, was ericabiz&#x27;s point.