In 2004, when CRM at the Speed of Light, 3rd Edition came out, I had the following to say about the strategy of salesforce.com down the pike:
"Now their intention as an APS (author's note: Application Provider Service) is to be the service provider for all the applications that you might ever need, and to be the omnipresent provider at that. If you need to work on your sales opportunities or design your marketing campaign or handle your orders or just write a business letter from anywhere you happen to be, salesforce.com plans to be the one you use.
Tien Tzu (sic.) (Author's Note: Sorry Tien, my bad here), chief marketing officer at salesforce.com, has a colorful way of putting it: 'The network is the computer. That's something that you heard of for a long time. Software is something that needs to sit inside the network, not on individual desktops. We envision a scenario where everyone goes to work, fires up browsers, looks at Yahoo, does their personal stuff, fires up their applications, and it's all inside the network. We want to provide that service.'
In their longer-term strategy and vision, the Internet is the public network and customer development is done to create your space within that public network. 'You've probably heard this one before,' says Tien Tzu (ow, again), 'but its like the movie The Matrix. The whole world works within the public network, available to you anytime anywhere for anything.'"
I presume that all you salesforce watchers out there saw their recent announcement for Summer 07 that they were releasing the Apex code generally in August making them the first, as they call it, "Platform as a Service (PaaS). Actually, in prior posts, I called it Services as a Platform (SaaP),
(I'm trying to figure out which one I like better. Two, two, two mints in one. Which one do you like better? Mine, right? Though I might like theirs better. Oh, I'm so confused.)
In any case, read Dan Farber's zdnet blog on it for the slightly technical version of what salesforce is doing. Very good entry on the gameplan.
Also a great move by salesforce.com and something that they have been relentlessly pursuing for awhile. Perhaps the only thing I didn't particularly foresee was the number of competitors they were (and are) going to have for the platform war. Those competitors range from Microsoft to Google to now even Facebook if it white labels itself. (that means allows other entities to use the platform outside of the direct Facebook environment and then allows the other companies to have it under their own brands. Bet you don't care about THAT definition, do you?).
The platform war is going to be heated and the winner nowhere near declared nor might there only be one winner. But whoever does, salesforce is now officially in the war zone.
And I scooped the world. Yeah, baby!!
Kinda.
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