Software Graveyard

Tuesday's keynote at Dreamforce was deceptive.

Like in prior years, attendees were treated to an A+ production. From the "Star Wars" like video, to the bombastic welcome from CEO Marc Benioff, to the heartfelt philanthropic discussion with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome, to the product announcements and humor and reinforcements that salesforce.com continues to defy the odds as it snaps up enterprise after enterprise. Yet, despite Dreamforce being phenomenal, it was a study of unintentional deception.

We were deceived because the significance of the main product announcement, salesforce.com Chatter, was lost in the hoopla. We took it as yet another salesforce.com milestone. Similar to AppExchange, Apex, and salesforce.com sites. We just assumed it was another development that would put another brick on the salesforce.com empire. Nothing more.

Moreover, we were disappointed, because in the back of our minds, we saw it as a "follower" move by salesforce, picking up on the collaboration paradigm previously trailblazed by Facebook, Twitter, et all. The new user interface and chatter were copycats from what we already know in the consumer web. While many sat in the audience awaiting the announcement of a marketing automation solution, or a business intelligence solution--these were on the wish lists of many bluewolf customers--Benioff went the chatter route.

So how were we deceived?

We were deceived because we witnessed the most monumental piece of evidence yet that software is officially doomed. Dead. Graveyard. Goodbye. SAP, Oracle, Microsoft. It's over. You read it here. Track their valuations for the next 24 months and then come back to this post and pinch yourself. You can look it up. I mean it. I have witnessed On-Demand and SAAS and The Cloud firsthand for the past ten years--I have built my own business around it--all the while meeting with CIO's whose inalienable right is to deny the future, catering to their legacy infrastructure while users moan and budgets rise. I, too, have sat with these CIO's doubting the speed with which the Cloud model could take hold. No longer.

We were deceived because right in front of 20,000 people Marc Benioff took his enterprise CRM product and turned it into Facebook. Presto. As if it were nothing. And when it is available, in the not too distant future, all of his customer's will get it. Instantly. No upgrades, no fussing, they'll just get it. And they'll be able to share information and collaborate on deals or invoices or customer solutions or whatever they want to collaborate on. In the same manner that they collaborate with relatives and friends and personal networks. In the same manner that we have been begging to collaborate in the business world, without knowing it. In a way that gets us OFF of email, and voicemail, and get's us INTO an easy to use business application that can be accessed from anywhere, tracked, reported on, and shared with anyone.

We'll be able to define our own interface in the same way that that we drag icons on our I*phone or Droid. For the the first time, business users--yes, sales people and service people and controllers and CEO's and marketing vp's--will be able to dictate their own view into enterprise data. Everyone. All 57,000 salesforce.com customer's. No fuss.

Think SAP or Oracle could ever pull that off? How's retirement, Bill?

Chatter is only the beginning of the new salesforce.com. But watch: it will take off fast. And it is a simple change, because the underlying data structure and security and workflow remains intact, leveraged in a manner that will increase the stickiness and adoption of salesforce.com's core services. The fulcrum of the application will become the discussion. Isn't that the fulcrum of every business in the world? If the discussion can be turned into action--by increasing a forecast, or requesting an approval, or booking an order, or talking to a partner, or solving a customer inquiry--without having to then log into another system, won't that make salesforce.com an application that people will instantly adopt, similar to their facebook at home? Won't we solve--for once and for all--the adoption problems of CRM? Has anyone ever been "trained" on facebook?

Benioff has been fighting the consumer web vs. business web conundrum for several years now. It comes up in many of his presentations. But, before Tuesday, his struggle had never pushed through to a solution that stacks salesforce.com well against those solutions. Rather, the interface of salesforce and its basic navigational requirements have slowly become more and more archaic as they have stood still. Those of us that have used it for the past decade will admit, behind closed doors, that it is no longer the "easy to use" application that drove us from Siebel in the first place, only because we have become accustomed to newer things that are now, indeed, "easy to use"--from social networking to the lastest PDA's. Chatter changes things. Dramatically.

And now, what do we stack it up against? Not SAP. Not Oracle. Not Microsoft. There is no one. For Oracle to put this in their product, and ship it to its already "stuffed" customer base, is pure science fiction. To do it to protect their 20% maintenance stream is not enough incentive. In fact, one can argue that the Cloud annuity model is finally turning the corner, because the leverage that a company like salesforce.com can attain from recurring revenue enables them and incentivizes them to innovate--stay still, and they lose customer's. Believe me, this has been the biggest fright at salesforce.com during the recession. When they lose a customer, they lose 100% to a typical software companies 20%. As great as the recurring model is when customer's are buying, it has the opposite affect when they are fleeing.

Innovation becomes the constant necessity. As much as Benioff relishes his annual Dreamforce keynote, he does it for pure survival. That is a good thing for the customer, because if he stood up there every year and pushed out release dates--hello, Larry--he'd be out of business. This year, if you were up close, you could see an extra twinkle in his eye. He knew this was not a typical product announcement. He took his time in the build up--the keynote ran 45 minutes over, and most people said it "dragged on"--and he kept lamenting on the consumer vs. business conundrum. He really, really, really, wanted the crowd to see the impact. But he lost them in the significance of what he was announcing, only because he has done this time and time again, and his audiences trust him, but they trust him to do visionary things, not monumental things.

In the end, it was another great Dreamforce. In the end, the critics will attempt to categorize the announcements and developments into their charts and graphs, and the doubters will complain that the buffet was average or that the Black Crows--the Gala Event concert--are showing their age. In the end, we'll read that CRM is one soft quarter from being sucked up by Oracle.

But mark my words. This was monumental. Goodbye software.