jnoneiliv

Will There Be Room on the Software Cloud for Salesforce.com?

Thanks for the article. This is good customer feedback, and nicely presented as "raw data".

It's not the end of the world for customers to complain about software. In fact a Harvard Business Review article ages ago demonstrated that satisfaction in software actually went down after users were trained. The explanation was that expectations went up.

With SF's success, expectations are bound to go up and complaints to start. Typical software lifecycle.

Keep the observations coming!

Salesforce.com Worth Half Its Current Price

I wouldn't question any of the analysis for short term trading, nor really care too much, but I am curious about the perspective on earnings.

Why would we be looking for earnings at this point in SF's life cycle?

Marketing and sales are given at 51% of expenses in the annual report, which is nearly the same as % of revenue with current income. With current revenue growth and investment in human capital (200-400 sales people), why would we want earnings? With 1, 2, and 3 year contracts with a conservative retention, isn't earnings just a matter of strategy and not financial performance?

Hypothetically, sales and marketing could be cut dramaticaly and SF would accumulate heap loads of cash and blow up earnings. Wouldn't they?

Even if R&D slowed down dramaticaly, I would not expect customers to change platforms for lack of new features or sales attention.

I think ratio's of share price to sales, book value, etc. are much better indicators of the company's valuation. It's one thing to trade the stock, but how would someone value this company if they were a venture capitalist? Certainly they wouldn't expect earnings in the first year, 2nd, 3rd?

This may all be irrelevant to a trader's perspective, but it would be interesting to see something different in the blogs than the typical short interest hype.