The deeper version of this is finding out about smalltalk and realizing that you could make a very configurable system that you could edit on the fly.
Salesforce is basically a smalltalk VM and dominates thanks to that
Salesforce is basically a smalltalk VM and dominates thanks to that
And if it is, why does it dominate "thanks to that"?
On top of this third party developers can build in stuff that is more or less first class to the system, and it can run on the third party systems but you can get away with using Salesforce's "compute". So you're shipping software for the Salesforce VM, so to speak.
I would recommend playing around with the system to see what's going on.