[Collaborative notes taken by Tom, Nat, Kevin et al. EAOE.]
“The cake has to bake” – I don’t buy the whole-new-web story, this is a maturation process. We’re only in the beginning, yes, but it’s not Web2.0 either.
We do use open source extensively, been coding since March ’99. Our killer apps on this stack are out (salesforce, supportforce), but now we’re selling our toolset, customforce (v2 shipped yesterday) to develop apps, competing with Access and IDEs. And, of course, there’s customforce, “database on demand”. Multiforce will be our OS, lets ISVs manage entire apps hosted on our network.
Our sw is free for universities and nonprofits.
Q: I used to describe you as Seibel, but now you sound more like Oracle.
A: When I started out was the era of 3270 terminals, an 80’s stack that only recently got replaced by MSFT in the ’90s. [“Oh, and Seibel — they’re still around” 🙂 ]
Merrill Lynch signed 5K users this week.
We have to show entrepreneurs in this industry what’s possible. We have other ideas in our labs that highlight that this is a platform — so you can sell software to manage “conference events”: payments, rsvps, etc. There’s a ‘long tail of enterprise apps…’
[He’s using long-tail as the label-du-jour for what used to be called “mission-critical custom apps”]
Part of customization is localization: Japan and China shouldn’t remain stepchild markets that wait for patches, etc. Much less customized to local cultures…
Q: Where’s your blog? A: crmsuccess.com
[but http://crmsuccess.com/ doesn’t obviously link to anything of Marc’s — but it’s apparently only for customers. IRC backchannel found http://crmsuccess.blogs.com/ which is public]
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