Google + Salesforce

Currently tighter integration of Google's online office-style apps. with Salesforce's platform.

Notes how viral Google apps are spreading :

Much of this will happen under-the-radar. David Armstrong, product and marketing manager for Google Enterprise in EMEA, told me yesterday that Google Apps already has half a million organizations — not individuals, organizations — signed up worldwide, with 2000 more signing up every day. But that astounding adoption rate is visible only to Google. There are no shrinkwrap packages passing through distributors’ warehouses or flying off retailers’ shelves. There’s not even any money changing hands for sign-ups to the free version. It’s just an invisible stream of bits in the ether. Adoption will be mostly unseen, until one day it will suddenly have become too big to ignore.

Meanwhile ZDnet bloggers are tracking the fast evolving cloud / platform-as-service war.

Salesforce becomes a YASN

Google leading a consortium of YASNS for a common application API is, of course, a fantastic idea.

I can run my app. on Ning, Orkut (which, if you live in this part of the world is a big deal), SalesForce (!!!) and LinkedIn? I am there, baby! (Or at least, just as soon as my FB application is done, I'll be porting it there. ;-)

Will it work to overthrow Facebook? Who knows?

One question is, what resources of access to the users the API will offer developers? This is where the cultural component of the YASNS becomes tricky.

The "killer" part of the YASN-as-platform is what it lets you do with people. And that varies with the culture and privacy policies of the YASN.

The crucial test here will be not "do these networks all provide the same API call to place a chunk of HTML on the user's home-page?". That's pretty boring and not what YASNS-as-platforms are about. (Aside : in fact, a good high-level language ought to be able to abstract away from those differences. ;-)

No, the crucial test is "will their query language (equivalent to Facebook's FQL) allow the same kind of searches to be done on the social network?"

The paradox is, that if the answer to that question is "yes" then all these social networks have just turned themselves into commodity web-hosting. In fact, it's worse than that. They'll neither be able to compete with each other on applications - everyone will have the same - nor on what I call "link-management" (ie. relationship-management) - because that's exactly what a common query language will standardize. So the only thing they have left to differentiate themselves is ownership of your social-network data.

Listen up : if the "common API" includes a common query language and set of relation-types and query permissions, then this is a big incentive for the YASNS to more jealously try to defend their "ownership" of your social network and will disincentivate them from sharing it or allowing "cross-network queries".

However, I don't expect that that's what's going to happen. YASNS-as-platforms have got to realize that they are offering a platform for relationship-management and they'll try to compete by offering different link-management features. So on LinkedIn you'll be able to filter and segment and query your social-network by different criteria from those available on Orkut. And the kind of things you can do with relationships will be the reason you choose LinkedIn rather than Orkut (or vice-versa).

And, if I'm right, and YASNS do see that their strategy is competing on link-management services, then any common query language defined within the consortium is necessarily a lowest-common denominator. And developers will be focused on taking advantage of the more comprehensive and sophisticated relationship management facilities which are only available on a particular YASN. So in practice the number of really interesting widgets and applications which can run across the different YASNS is going to be trivial.

ps : shame I didn't see Tribe on the list of consortium members. That could at least keep them in the game if these applications run on it.

Gulp! Faceforce!!!

Interview with Clara Shih.

Five years from now, no enterprise app — CRM, HR, ERP — won’t be integrated with the social graph.

Marc Andreesen has a great blog-post that starts with an attempt at defining what a platform is.

He breaks it down into 3 levels :

Level 1 platforms provide an API for external applications to call their services.

Level 2 platforms (eg. Facebook) help the external application present themselves by incorporating the applications within their UI. I'd say that we're really talking about platforms which provide a "callback" to the application.

Level 3 platforms host and execute the application themselves. With the benefit that the platform can broker richer integration between the applications. This is obviously what Salesforce's Force does. And, of course, Ning - the best part of this email is that it signal that Andreeson is trying to promote the "development environment" idea of Ning which was the exciting idea that kind of got lost when they rebranded it as "just another social network". (Asde : In fact, does Ning have what it takes to become a budget Force / AppExchange rival?)

He goes on to make a very good point :

Second, beware overfocusing on the apps of the past when thinking about the platforms of the future.

Lots of people got confused by the idea of apps running in the browser because when they thought of apps, they thought of the apps they used already on their PCs -- Word, Excel, Powerpoint -- and not the apps that would get built on the web -- eBay, Amazon, Salesforce.com. Now, it turns out in the fullness of time that word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation apps are also moving into the web -- as Google is demonstrating. But way before that happened, the web led people to create lots of new kinds of applications that were not possible on the PC.

A new platform typically enables a new set of applications that were not previously possible. Why else would there be a need for a new platform?

Force launched ... come back soon when I've had some time to look into it.

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.

Google and Salesforce merger rumours.

• Salesforce.com and Google more than just partners?


• Salesforce Is Acquisition Bait


• Perhaps Google will buy Salesforce.com after all

Google / Salesforce Mashup

Google vs. Salesforce