As I recover from yesterday’s Thanksgiving festivities, I’ve been struck by two thoughts regarding last week’s Dreamforce conference,

Salesforce.com’s new Chatter social computing functionality may be a defensive as well as proactive move.
An acquisition of Salesforce.com by Oracle may be a friendly maneuver rather than a hostile takeover.

As I reported in my previous blogpost, Salesforce.com’s introduction of Chatter last week at Dreamforce was met with mixed reviews. Many customers, partners, analysts, press and even internal staff and salespeople were uncertain about the company’s goals and capabilities in this new area.

I believe that building an ‘enterprise-class’ social networking component makes sense and adds a timely new dimension to salesforce.com’s fundamental functionality.

Marc Benioff justified salesforce.com’s move by claiming in his keynote address at Dreamforce that neither Facebook nor Twitter were willing to fortify their services to meet the needs of enterprise users.

But, what … Read More »