Salesforce + Google = MSN Killer
Here's the vision: Salesforce provides the distribution platform and half the developer talent for a full office suite. Because of Apex developers can hyper target the office suites to specific business segments.

Google provides the other half of the talent for building the suite and monetizes the whole thing with ads and selling/leveraging data capture.

Susan Kuchinskas, in attending the Dreamforce conference, noted:

"In case anyone in the audience missed this, Benioff asked how many people in the audience had seen Google Spreadsheets. Only a few raised their hands, so Benioff gave a demo! He’s also been trying to convince enterprises including GE to convert from Microsoft Office to Google’s online apps."

WOW! The CEO of the hottest software company on the web encouraging GE to use Google's apps online.

And with the President, Jim Steele, saying he wants to turn the company into a segment-agnostic eBay for software as a service I think we could see in the coming years a HUGE threat to MSN from a Google + Salesforce hookup.

I've long been a Salesforce.com fan (maybe that's what has them out bidding me in adwords for my name? ;)

In Hey Google: Enable 3rd Party Enterprise App Development Like SalesForce Did I noted what I thought was some of their strong points.

I followed a similar line of thinking recently in Google's Growth Track: Becoming Ad Distribution's AppExchange.

I picked on them a little in SalesForce Eats a Golden Child, Purchases Enterprise Search App Kieden for CRM + SEM. I also interviewed Kieden before Salesforce snapped them up.

And it was with great pleasure that I recently recorded Salesforce.com president Jim Steele's keynote presentation at the CED Tech Conference (I didn't catch ALL of it unfortunately...)

Jim Steele p1: the Business of User-Driven Innovation


Jim Steele p2: the Business of User-Driven Innovation


So, students of web business, you would do well to study Salesforce and watch as they embed Google's office suite (and eventually their own...) in corporate America.

I would suggest too that you learn more about Apex, the new "multi-tenant, on-demand OS" from Salesforce.

Shortly I will be linking to the Salesforce + IBM Q/A session I recorded at the CED Tech Conference too - good stuff. If you're really eager you can find them by searching on YouTube :)
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |