Salesforce's new open / social / online application platform..

This is massive. As the culmination and synthesis of several of the most important trends going on at the moment. This is going to blow up the enterprise software market the way the microcomputer blew up the mainframe market.

- any company can "rent" - as a service - an enterprise-class database-backed infrastructure from Salesforce.

- any programmer, or small company, can write applications for it.

- the applications will talk to each other via Salesforce's protocols.

- developers don't have to *sell* their application through the usual "sell big expensive software for humungous amounts of money, with lots of free lunches, kick-backs, professional sales-teams and special companies owned by the son of the procurador" channels; instead you just make your app available for companies to rent at ... erm "a flat $25/month/user".

(In fact, if Salesforce go the viral method - currently raging in Facebook - where you can encourage your friends (or in the case of business, your suppliers and customers) to install the application, then your app. can spread like wildfire *without* having to market it at all.)

Effectively, large suites break up into a swarm of widgets and mini-apps sitting on top of open, and standard, protocols and storage.