GreyHairedFortranDeveloper

Salesforce.com: Pricey and Coming Down Fast

Not so many years ago, data was entered using 'punch cards.' All database updates would occur at the end of business day (when the punch cards were processed). Information retrieved from the database wasn't 'real-time' it was only as current as the previous night's punch-card run. In other words you wouldn't be able to see today's data until tomorrow.

A company named Walker Interactive "changed the paradigm." After Walker introduced 'Interactive database updates' (I.e.after you hit the ENTER key, your data was immediately available to other users.) nobody would accept anything less.

Larry Ellison hired Jeff Walker (the founder of Walker Interactive) to build Oracle's application division. (Walker also served as Oracle's CFO and Marketing VP.)

At Walker Interactive, Jeff Walker "changed the paradigm." He changed our expectations about our ability to timely access our company's data. Now we accept nothing less.

Marc Benioff has 'changed the paradigm' yet again.

Starting a software company rooted in force.com now takes only a bit more tech savvy than selling stuff on Ebay. Force.com application-developers will proliferate because it is easy and free to develop on force.com. The development time invested is minimal and if nobody buys your application on the application exchange - well, you've invested nothing more than your time. No VC money, no recruiting, no leasing of equipment or buildings, no more multiple layers of software licenses, etc.

Software companies stuck in the traditional development model simply won't be able to compete with force.com companies that risk nothing until they have a customer to support.

How many companies will be born simply because their cost to access hosted storage, tools, technologies, CRM, SFA, etc is so small that there is no longer a risk to just tossing it out there to see if there is interest?

If that ain't a 'paradigm change' I'm not sure what is!

Salesforce.com Worth Half Its Current Price

Charlie Bottle -- You've put Salesforce in a CRM box and you deride force.com as 'hype' so I think you must not understand what a "game changer" that offering a 'software development environment as a service' truly is!

I cut my teeth on Fortran, COBOL, PL1 and Pascal back in the 80s and I learned SQL in the 90s working for Sybase. Developing applications back then was hard and building the infrastructure to support a software development staff back then was costly. You paid for OS licensing & hardware support from multiple vendors, you paid Sybase, Oracle and IBM for relational database licenses. You paid development tool vendors for their stuff and you paid IT people, database administrators, network admins, etc to keep it all running. AND you paid everybody for a LONG time before your sales people had anything to sell.

Force.com changed that.

Now an antique, 'green-screen programmer' like me who can't write a lick of JavaScript, HTML or C++, can develop applications on force.com and sell them on the application exchange - and its easy!

Google, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM are now getting into the game, so I suspect they're not listening to Charlie Bottle about the 'hype'.

Disclosure: I don't work for Salesforce but I've spent three weeks tinkering with their developer.force.com environment and IT IS COMPELLING so I'm going to buy some shares of CRM.

As an old software engineer, it presents new opportunities for me personally and new revenue streams for Salesforce