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It is part of the American Experience to be always searching for self-improvement, and I think that contributes to our obsession with New Year's resolutions. I have made a few of my own over the years and 2007 will be no exception. In the last few days I have witnessed this urge to plan and improv...

When making forecasts for a year ahead, I have always found the "greater fool" theory comforting. In short, it takes a fool to make a forecast, and a greater one to believe it. On balance then, I think it wise to hide these predictions from children, the gullible, the insane, etc. Some people wil...

It's hard to believe that it's time to make predictions for the year ahead -- it feels like I just finished that job, but here we are again. I dug up my 2006 predictions and was amazed at how close some of them were. The lesson I derive here is that I must not have been trying hard enough. The fun...

Salesforce.com is having a good year this quarter. That's not a typo, the company seems to be announcing a year's worth of new products in a very short time, though delivery for some of the announcements might stretch out to this time next year. This week, Salesforce announced what I think of as t...

I have always advocated that CRM is a growing field, and that it grows at the margins whenever some innovative company introduces a new application type. As such, the definition really speaks more about all of the front office than CRM alone. Nevertheless, over the last few years we've seen a lot ...

Salesforce.com made another announcement this week. This time they have announced a new integration facility that is based in part on the announced, but as yet undelivered, Apex programming language. Not to quibble, Salesforce has had a good year but it is slowly beginning to get into a futures gam...

You have to take your hat off to Salesforce.com, I think. Last week's earnings call was a thing of beauty. It was the kind of thing that I bet every entrepreneur must dream of doing someday -- reporting to the investors on a great quarter for their newly public company. It wasn't so long ago that...

One of the benefits from the explosion of sales effectiveness solutions has been the effect on the marketing process. For too long, selling was regarded as a pseudo science while marketing was regarded as an art that needed to be tightly controlled to prevent waste. So it was no surprise to hear d...

I have been very encouraged by the flurry of activity in the sales effectiveness space. Over the last 18 months or so, emerging vendors there have taken a concept that had been around for a while and breathed new life into it. Sales effectiveness is still a catch-all category. If you had to distill ...

I got a call from a friend the other day lamenting the loss of technical IT jobs to lower cost economies. I know this is a charged subject, but I thought I would wade into it to explore what it means for CRM. First off, I am not sure I agree with the point that many people make that exporting jobs ...

You have to give credit where it is due, and today that means kudos to Oracle. More than 40,000 customers, analysts, press and others have converged this week in San Francisco for Oracle Open World, the annual user conference. It is mind-boggling to think that the 40,000 people in San Francisco re...

I keep thinking about the idea of this incubator that Salesforce.com is launching. As you know, I am a student of inflection points and I think the incubator potentially represents a very big one. There is a popular trend in economics to look at economic systems on the same plane as living ecosyste...

There are so many things that I could write about Dreamforce that I have had to quickly conclude that it won't all fit into one column, and I will be writing about it for some time to come. I bet I am not alone. Here are some ideas that I thought were important, however. The big announcement was A...

A lot of people will descend on the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week for Salesforce.com's annual user meeting, Dreamforce. I think I have been to every one of these events and this year marks a turning point. Previous meetings have been held in local hotels and other venues around the cit...

I was having a discussion the other day with a client about changes in the software industry. We got to talking about different trends when the subject turned to the current tendency of discussing business software in terms of the size of the company that uses it. "Enterprise" software has certain...

Someone recently asked me who I thought was ahead in the on-demand market. That's a hard one. As far as I am concerned, there are no right answers to a question like that, and though seemingly innocuous, it raises more questions than I can answer. For starters, I don't even think it is a single ma...

I spent part of last week at a user group meeting high in the Rockies, the RightNow Summit. The term "summit" is not only figurative -- it's literal. The company is headquartered in Bozeman, Mont., another high spot on the continent, and it seems to select meeting locations near the tree line to b...

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the on-demand call center, and about how the new technology model is driving business model change. With so much happening in the call center, you might be led to believe that being a call center agent is the best job in the world. Well, maybe not the best job,...

I had my annual meeting with my friends at Walker Information the other day when they were in Boston talking about their latest report. I have written about Walker before, and it gives me pleasure to do so again -- and to point out that I have no business relationship with them; I just like what th...

Friends in the call center software industry are telling me that they've noticed a decided pickup in their business. What's interesting about that tidbit is that these people are also saying that the interest is in on-demand solutions and that opens a lot of topics for discussion. For example, we ...