Thomas J. Gordon

Salesforce.com Unlikely to Sustain Its Current High Multiple

Zach, two things. 1) They have a decent technical relationship with google and any time an announcement is made people think goog is going to buy crm above the current price. 2) also I think a lot of people are short this stock relative to the float. When the price goes up a bunch of shorts get out quickly. You don't have any patient shorts here.

Salesforce.com Unlikely to Sustain Its Current High Multiple

i agree. It's a good company, it will be around. But they're not doing anything technically that locks new (current customers they probably hold on to pretty well) customers into them like microsoft selling windows or something. They may have some first mover monopoly but does that deserve a 100+ p to e after 5 years of operation. google blew the doors off earnings in it's youth. These guys beat earnings 5% and it's a few million bucks, does that deserve a 100+ p to e?

Salesforce Likely To Be Below $15 By Year's End

I would argue even if Force is very profound the stock is still overpriced. I tend to agree with Sunil that Force is not that profound. Sunil makes a good point about saleforce.com. You can see they are always trying to cuddle up to the sexiest (also high p to e) parts of the web. google, facebook, ... even though the real business value may be negligible. I think they're good at stock promotion. I don't know about 15 but I say teens after the earnings announcement. It's a decent company, I think they'll be around, but I don't think they deserve a 100 p to e.

Salesforce.com: Clearly Mediocre

scudub
it's a year and a half later and dimitriv called the stock price almost exactly. you should be more circumspect in questioning other people's intelligence.

Lawson's Harry Debes: SaaS Industry Will Collapse in Two Years

Colin,

change my prior comment to "if you say on-premise"
... Flash

Lawson's Harry Debes: SaaS Industry Will Collapse in Two Years

Colin,

I guess it's obvious but I'm not seeing it. Which has better margins, Saas or on-premise. I'm short crm. If you say Saas I'm going to laugh. 100,000 people at msft kill themselves to do hard things and the stock has gone no where for the last 8 years. and I think msft has monopoly power in the marketplace. crm has a p to e of 300 and seems to keep going up even though they make 8 cents a share. Something doesn't make sense.

Lawson's Harry Debes: SaaS Industry Will Collapse in Two Years

Daya - great article. Thanks for posting it.

It's funny Debes has the perspective, there was tymnet, there was Ask ManMan .... , . People think the cloud idea is something new.

I'm not sure I agree with Debes with how easy it is to stop using Saas. If you just put in 8000 customers I don't think you'd lightly make the decision to use something else.

My big question with Saas is how you do change control. I am an IT person. So Saleforce is sitting there with 5000 different customers, each with their own installation, presumably starting on the same release. And some of those customers are very fussy about anything changing in their application. So how do you make any improvement to the base system given all the technical issues and the fact that some customers might try to veto a change you want to make.

Is SaaS Worth the Hype?

Technology is not exempt from the laws of economics. Something can be a very good idea, but if other people can copy the idea and offer a competing service, margins drop. SaaS is a good idea but there are no barriers to entry to offering competing products. I view very few things in technology as monopolies. Microsoft is a monopoly in my opinion (the competition for the o.s. (vista) and office is weak, and now they are extending their client advantage into the enterprise, (unix servers now have products with windows authentication)) and they have a p to e of 16, about the average for the s&p. crm can have competition and they have a p to e of 200 for projected 2008 earnings. if SaaS companies went down this year it just means that equity pricing for those companies got ahead of itself due to overzelous mutual fund managers and momo investors. imho