It's over, Dreamforce that is, and I have gotten some needed sleep on the flight back to Boston. As I contemplate Dreamforce 2012 and its meaning, I have three observations. First, it was what I expected it to be. If you refer back to my post just before the show opened my expectations were more tha...
As you read this, Dreamforce 2012 is underway and Marc Benioff is giving his keynote presentation. I've been in San Francisco since Monday and have watched the city -- especially near the Moscone Center -- swell like a pumpkin on a vine in late summer. If Salesforce's 70,000 registered attendees do...
Now is the golden age of marketing. I was tempted to write the second golden age since history sometimes seems to repeat but I am more of the Mark Twain school of history and he believed that history did not repeat itself but that it rhymed. In that vein, what could be seen as the first golden age o...
My sources tell me that Salesforce.com will be handling its major Dreamforce announcements differently this year. Rather than letting us drink from a firehose at the event, they promise to tell us much of their news beforehand so that they can spend the keynotes, I assume, drilling down into more o...
Pascal Houillon, the CEO of Sage North America, has been at the job for a bit over a year. He took over the reins at last year's Sage Summit where he famously introduced a new branding exercise. Houillon's idea was to make Sage a more prominent brand by de-emphasizing the individual product names,...
It's good to be busy, but I remember when August was a slow month, sort of like January, and for the same reasons. The holidays are out of the way, there's less to do -- other than eat the Christmas chocolates or the summer squash and tomatoes, and think about spring or going back to school. The A...
I'm just back from a week in the woods, trying to get my head around social media and CRM again. That means I'm in the middle of writing up a report on some research that uberanalyst Esteban Kolsky and I did over the last few months, and smack in the middle of CRM Idol judging. Everything's fine, a...
I dropped a small stone in a large pool last week, and the ripples are still spreading. In a separate post I wrote that IT is over. I was very careful to say that IT is over as a disruptive innovation and as an economic engine, but few understood what I meant, so I thought this would be a good cha...
What's the world coming to? Microsoft lost money in the software business last quarter -- the first loss in a decades-long string of positive earnings from the world's biggest software company. Sheesh! Yes, there were extenuating circumstances, but the loss signals the breadth and depth of the impa...
I have always been interested in the similarities between biology and economics and ultimately business. In the last few years we've adopted some of the parlance of biology when we talk about business, especially social business. Perhaps the best example is the analogy we freely make between a ven...
This week Esteban Kolsky and I launched a research initiative aimed at better understanding how businesses across the world are adopting social media for their business processes. There has been anecdotal evidence over the last five-plus years about social's efficacy as a business tool, and there ha...
I spent most of last week in Boston at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, where I was honored to be the sales and marketing track chairman. Next year it will be called "E2 Social" and will bookend the other conference that has been held in Santa Clara, which will become known as "E2 Innovate." There's...
Last week I lamented how the legacy software establishment was focusing on the easy-to-sell parts of cloud computing without really providing the essence of cloud. Since then, I have been inspired by a couple of recent articles that point in a different though not opposite direction. "Oracle Is Sta...
Oracle re-introduced its new cloud/social constellation of stuff last week that it had announced back at OpenWorld. If I count the analyst briefing I got in Redwood Shores in April, it was a re-re-introduction. Oracle is not the only company to follow this strategy. For example, Salesforce follow...
Salesforce.com announced it was buying Buddy Media for nearly $700 million on Monday. In any discussion, that's a lot of money, maybe more than Salesforce has yet spent on any acquisition. What's going on? As you might expect, I see economics playing an important role here, and I think there are ...
Yes, communities and infrastructure can't keep up
Some projects are moving too fast
No, expansion is needed to meet demand
The pace seems about right
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