Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab

Started the day with the latest salesforce.com event at the Palace, the first of a hundred-city Tour de Force to evangelize developers into the Force.com development as a service (DAAS) platform now up and running. Marc Benioff and Marc Andreesen had a fireside chat where they seemed to be interested in the similarities between salesforce’s enterprise Web services and Ning’s consumer Web services. In fact, they are sitting on opposite sides of the elephant and somehow don’t see that there is virtually no distinction. As Marc A. noted, entrpreneurs now have the ability to put a startup on its feet for virtually (keyword) no money, making investment (from Marc’s perspective) safer. Of course, Marc B.’s strategy is to grow his developer cloud, or in Marc the Other’s terminology, makes commitment to the Force platform “safer.” As Andreesen noted, all you need is a bunch of MacBook Pro’s and a Net connection.

At lunch I sat next to the new salesforce executive in charge of all things developer, and she told me of her response to the question of what metric would be used as a success indicator: “How many developers sign on by the end of the week.” Benioff blew a little smoke about how the Oracle and Sun deals represent the end stage of the last generation of dev tools, suggesting we were now moving into dev services. I say smoke because it was gratuitous to raise the competitive spectre at the very moment when the combination of services and Eclipse rendered the old way improved not deprecated.

But Andreessen is also subtly overselling when he interweaves the notions of services and social. Of course the massive scale of virtualized services resembles social networks. To the user they are identical. Abstracting salesforce’s servers or Amazon’s or Ning’s or Facebook’s or, most tellingly, composite services that aggregate all of these sources and more into a service architecture that runs on top of all these social networks — that’s what is now enabled. Benioff acknowledged as much, and in so doing, presaged the real dynamic of the next few months, as producers make distribution deals for their new pictures.

I use the record/movie business analogy because the lesson of Apple’s MacWorld announcements is that services are the commodity, and targeted visibility drives the revenue. If software is marketed as entertainment then how does it reach its audience? If Ning and salesforce have no distinction, then an information service that visualizes digital theater licensing workfow inside a distributed corporation (Dolby) is virtually indistinguishable from a movie rental platform that sits across Apple TV, Air, and iPhone/iTouch.

Viewed as such, the salesforce developer pitch is to incent code creation that can be reused across both consumer and enterprise domains, because the differentiator is access to the executive decision makers via their committed information delivery systems. Should a business process identify the signature of a merger/acquisition target, the strategic marketing opportunity is to present the rollup of the business imperative of the deal as quickly as possible to a virtual consensus of decision makers. It’s business process modules as a service, abstracted across the alleged domains of business and pleasure.

Ended the day with Dave Winer’s first public demo of his FlikrFan screensaver project. Where Force demos bore the breadcrumbs of Winer’s early work in source code references to SOAP, FlikrFan’s services subtly hinted at an emerging platform of dynamic RSS feed generation, or RAAS. I’ll leave that to another day, but you can be sure Dave is already several steps ahead of the market he largely created. Benioff and Andreesen would do well to pay attention.

Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 10:47 pm.
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