I have commented in the past about my increasing respect for Marc Benioff – enough so that I was (and still am) willing to commit significant resources to migrating the Armory over to AppExchange. But after attending DreamForce this week, several caution flags emerged tempering my enthusiasm for Marc and the AppExchange.
My concerns are primarily in the area of Salesforce.com’s commitment to building a sustainable business model around AppExchange. I think that Salesforce.com still has an enormous amount of work to do in building out and developing their own CRM application and AppExchange community before heading on to greener pastures.
Marc is the quintessential American entrepreneur – meaning he is half carnival barker and half visionary leader. There is a fine line between the two identities and it doesn’t take much for a visionary entrepreneur one day to be a carnival barker the next. Two hallmarks of great American entrepreneurs are impatience and the willingness to risk everything – which may be a good thing for SFDC shareholders – but a bad thing for those of us depending upon a vibrant, functioning CRM community.
I was impressed by several of his CRM product managers so let’s hope they have both the mandate and resources to turn AppExchange for CRM developers into the category killer it can and should be. But if Benioff sucks capital and competencies from his CRM folks to open up these other opportunities then it’s lights out on Salesforce.com.
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