Dreamforce and baseball

One thing that impressed me about Dreamforce was Salesforce’s ability to be creative, to invent something completely unexpected to announce in Chatter.  Whether Chatter will be any good when it is released next year is debatable but Salesforce did what it was supposed to do in bringing out a big new idea for its assembled customers.

Most importantly, the Chatter announcement made a mockery of the attempts by SugarCRM and Microsoft to anticipate and respond.  I think those efforts fizzled because they were largely expecting a more conventional set of announcements than they got.

It was like baseball.  If you’re a pitcher and you have a batter with a 3-2 count sitting on a fastball you might throw one but it might be better not to, instead opting for a breaking ball.  If you have to throw the heater you want to make sure it’s  just out of the zone to make the batter question whether to swing or take what ought to be ball four.  Lots of good hitters end up striking out in that situation because they’re momentarily frozen.

Some of that happened at Dreamforce and parenthetically, I have to commend Oracle for wisely deciding not to anticipate Salesforce’s announcements with a truth squad though they certainly could have.

So now Salesforce has this new, new thing to explain and about six months to do it.  I have to say that the idea both new and not new and getting your head around it might be challenging, I know it was for me.  Let me try again to describe it now that I have slept on it a bit more.

Think about social media, specifically Twitter and Facebook for they are the closest analogies.  Social networks operate on three key elements, according to Salesforce and I have no strong objections to this model.  The elements of success in social media are people, content and applications.  Social media are only valuable if lots of people use them (the network effect) and they use these media to get content or to use applications.

That’s fairly abstract but think about Facebook whose content is supplied by users who provide all the details of their lives including photos.  Facebook is the largest photo sharing site on the internet, I am told.  So notes about your life and photos, that’s pretty much the content side.  The other bit is applications.  We use applications on Facebook to enrich our experience and to get more information and content from others.

The people at Salesforce remind me that the content and applications are only valuable if they are in circulation, if they are used by members.  Like a relay race, it doesn’t matter which person is running, what does matter is how fast the baton moves around the track.  In the same way, if information is static because it is stored on a network drive somewhere and few people know about it, then it has much less utility than if it was being used by many people.  The more people that use applications and data within you company to do business the more value they have.
Now, where is all this information and where are the applications.  Of course they are in your in-house repositories, in the data center.  But there is also information stored in people’s heads that has potential value such as the deep backgrounds of employees, their skills and things they know that may not directly impact their jobs.

But what if that information too could be surfaced and stored for easy applicability?  In Chatter all of that information is easily rendered as well as information about information and all of it can be subscribed to.  In an earlier post I offered the idea of subscribing to the data of a sales forecast so that when it changes the subscriber is notified.  It’s not much different from becoming friended on Facebook – you get updates when something changes on a friend’s page and it is your decision whether or not to use it — that’s what makes social media work.

Social media is like a big exception machine notifying you about the deltas in life.  It’s management by exception and it gives you the ability to keep up with a lot without devoting much attention to the minutia.  If you think something is important you post it and your friends or followers have the discretion to decide if it’s worth absorbing.

This model could do a lot for business if implemented properly but there are many if’s associated with that statement.  The if’s will begin to be filled in by the first strategic use cases and with them we should begin to get an idea of best practices and all the rest.  That will be extremely important.
Not long ago I read Niall Ferguson’s “The Ascent of Money” in which there was an intriguing quote from George Soros, the billionaire financier and philanthropist.   Soros said, “Every bubble consists of a trend and a misconception that interact in a reflexive manner.”  But what are product innovations if not bubbles that attract attention and money for a time before the bubble bursts and we move on to new bubbles, new paradigms?  The experience economy was such a bubble and customer experience is its misconception.  Social media in business is a bubble too.  What will its misconception be?

Three blind men and an elephant

It has been a while since our industry saw anything like Salesforce.com’s just announced Chatter.  Technically, we’ve not seen anything like it period.  True there are aspects of Chatter that are already reflected in other products on the market but I am speaking about the novelty of the proposed application that was announced yesterday at Dreamforce.

Chatter is a pure innovation; you can tell that it is because most of the people I hang with – myself included — are trying to figure out if it is fish or fowl.  I am writing this in advance of a keynote this morning that will, no doubt, add some heat to the discussion but I wonder how much light.

I am not ready to pronounce anything about Chatter and since the product won’t be out for at least three, and possibly closer to six, months I am reserving judgment for now.  Nonetheless, some initial impressions are in order, otherwise why am I here?

Chatter is part of what Salesforce has dubbed its fourth cloud and although they describe it as a collaboration tool, it is really all about intelligence, hence the name.  I doubt that Chatter will ever be able to capture bin Laden but, aimed at the internal mechanism of a company’s business processes, it ought to provide some lubrication to those processes.

I think lubrication is a good – though scarsely the only — way to look at Chatter too.  Chatter offers the promise of providing greater transparency to a company’s inner workings, which should result in better decisions and fewer surprises.  For instance, Chatter makes each data item an active, or perhaps it is better stated as non-passive, element in a company’s decision-making.  In the forecasting realm, a deal’s size, completion date and other attributes will now be active in that, if and as they change, they could make their new statuses known to others.

So, a sales manager might subscribe to a sales person’s whole forecast or just the big deal that is supposed to close this quarter.  A change with an immediate alert will give the representative, the manager and others in the organization more time to react to the news and possibly affect the outcome.  Currently, an organization that reports its forecast once a month might lose four weeks on the follow up but Chatter would make the response more or less instantaneous.

Chatter is not the only product capable of this feat.  In this scenario I can see other products doing similar things, for example Right90, which specializes in forecasting.  Other scenarios will bring other products to mind and that is one spot where the debate rises over how revolutionary Chatter really is.  Some?  A lot? Not at all?

Then there’s the question about whether or not this is a good thing.  The answer?  Sure.  Maybe. I dunno.  When you peel the onion on this you discover how nuanced Chatter is.  There are dials and settings to deal with that prevent a subscriber to data’s changes from being overwhelmed by background noise – don’t show me all deals, just the ones that will pay off my mortgage, for example.

Chatter and noise are two well-chosen terms from true intelligence gathering and they certainly deserve to be part of the conversation.  It is interesting to me that Chatter’s focus is internal decision-making and not the vast ocean of data that exists outside a company’s walls.  The decision about focus makes the task at hand far more manageable and signals the importance of reducing the siloed nature of information that is still alive and well decades after that term was first coined.

By its nature, information will always be siloed – there is too much to know and too many people who may need to know it for information to be perfectly democratized.  But Chatter does something close to solving the problem by making data active rather than passive and automatically subscribable rather than purely reportable.  It is that subscribability (to coin a phrase) embedded in a company’s information processing milieu that is so intriguing and potentially powerful and it is the lubrication that I alluded to at the beginning.

It is also one aspect of what makes this announcement something that we haven’t seen in a while.  It is close to a pure innovation, the kind of thing that makes people like me scratch our heads or like the three blind men and the elephant, want to run our hands all over it and make tentative first declarations about what it is.  If this kind of innovation is back, does this mean the recession is really over?  I hope so.

Salesforce Chatter

Salesforcce turned an important corner with the introduction of Salesforce Chatter a social platform intended to incorporate popular social media like Twitter and Facebook deeply into the fabric of modern business.  I am not sure this is the perfect social model for social CRM but it certainly complies with the growing need for CRM and vendors in general to do a better job of listening to their customers.

The next big move in enterprise software will have to accommodate the shift from ever expanding markets to situations that are more zero-sum for the simple reason that customers behave differently in the zero-sum world – more like retail customers.

Chatter strikes me as a social media monitoring solution and that can be valuable in a variety of situations.  I’ll report more as the keynote evolves.

Random notes

not a lot of new stuff announced yet.  Looks like tomorrow will be the big day, I hope.  We know they’re going to announce Chatter at some point.

Lots of non PCs mostly Mac’s here.  Wonder how much Linux is here.  Non-PC, non-windows machines are a telltale sign of Microsoft’s waning influence.

Kicking off Dreamforce

Oy veh!  Dreamforce hasn’t opened its doors officially but there’s plenty of howling going on outside.  Yesterday, I reported that Microsoft had set up an ersatz truth squad for the event and today SugarCRM joined the act.  As I did yesterday, I reprint the entirety of the email I got below.

Commentary:

I don’t think the way to rise above a competitor is to quote him or her extensively as SugarCRM does here, but I acknowledge that some of this is just my New England roots showing.  I recall some rather cheesy stunts by Salesforce in the early days like giving out Krispy Kremes in LA outside the Siebel user group meeting or driving a little van around the streets of Canes (France) with the No Software logo on it at the European version of the same.

Seems like the whole industry is on pins and needles as Marc Benioff prepares to take the stage this morning.  The competition is looking for a way to stem a tsunami and users want more, more, more.

A couple of years ago in New England we had a football team that had a perfect regular season (thanks, Giants!).  During that run the Patriots were beating other teams by what almost looked like college basketball scores.  Some people were alarmed about the Pat’s lack of sporting etiquette for some of the lopsided scoring but the discussion settled down when some sage person said, and I am paraphrasing here — We’re professionals.  If we don’t want the Patriots to score so much, it’s our job to stop them.

The same thing applies here, the competition saw this coming for the last decade and they all took their time reacting to the disruption that is SaaS and Cloud Computing.  If you want to stop Salesforce, make a better product.  Forget the cute book ideas and truth squads.

 

Hey Denis,

Marc Benioff has a few zingers for SugarCRM in his new book “Behind the Cloud”:

“We knew that we had truly emerged as the market leader in the eyes of the industry when we arrived at Dreamforce 2006 to find that a handful of employees from a small CRM company had set up a mock protest outside the convention center. I’m not really sure what they were protesting, and it was a small, low-budget, and poorly executed rip-off of the types of tactics we had invented, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that we knew not to get ruffled.” - Page 65 of “Behind the Cloud”

We are sorry we disappointed Marc during our previous visit to Dreamforce. 

He even challenged us to “step up the innovation”:

“We did not want this company to get free PR on our coattails! Ignoring this escapade worked well. A blogger asked a Dreamforce attendee if she had seen what was going on outside when she arrived, and she replied that it must have been some kind of Salesforce.com stunt. (Note: if you are going to compete with someone at his or her own game, always remember to step up the innovation.)” - Page 65 of “Behind the Cloud” by Marc Benioff

If you insist Marc. 

In continuing its long love affair with the industry’s most down-to-earth CEO and our commitment to staging “small, low-budget, and poorly executed rip-off [tactics]”, SugarCRM is currently distributing 1,000 copies of “Behind the Smokescreen: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Still Manages to Sell 1999 technology 10 years later” at Dreamforce today. 

You can get your hard copy on the sidewalks outside Moscone (look for the people dressed as big books;).

Or you can read the eBook here: www.sugarcrm.com/smokescreen With an endorsement from North Korean leader Kim Jong II (“A great guide for any entrepreneur, CEO, or Head of State looking to promote openness and freedom”), Behind the Smokescreen is a response to the magical Salesforce.com marketing that has transformed the company’s service from .com ASP to On-Demand SaaS to Cloud Computing without being apple to run its service on Amazon EC2 ,Microsoft Azure or other cloud services.

To celebrate the release of the book, SugarCRM is offering a free data migration for Salesforce.com users through the end of the year. Registrants will have a chance to win a free Motorola Droid.

SugarCRM hopes that the publication of this book “step[s] up the innovation”. 

Please contact me if you would like more details. Or you can contact me on Wednesday through Christine McKeown of Schwartz Communications at (510) 501-7333

Regards,

Martin Schneider

“There is a Japanese belief that business is temporal, whereas relationships are eternal. That’s true, One day you compete. The next day you partner. One day someone is your subordinate; the next day he or she may be your superior. At its finest, business is friendly competition, just like a game of tennis.” -       Page 39 of “Behind the Cloud”

If you’re going to San Francisco…

Lots of people (OK, three) have asked for meetings while at Dreamforce next week.  While I want to see everyone, the reality is that my free time is very limited.  So, the best way to get me into your booth is to call my cell 617-901-2072 to set something up.  The best time for me is Thursday afternoon.  I hope that helps the three of you — you know who you are…

Larry Ellison at Dreamforce?

This is completely speculation on my part but I was wondering if Larry Ellison has any intention of speaking at Dreamforce the same way that Marc Benioff spoke at Oracle Open World.  Might be fun but keep in mind that this speculation.  If you have any information I would love to hear it.