Is CRM becoming a commodity? It seems like anybody with a application that contains a Leads, Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities tab can be a good CRM. Which begs the question, are people paying a premium for Salesforce.com?

NetSuite is not the first company to aggressively target Salesforce.com customers. But they just announced their RenewForce program which allows current Salesforce.com customers to switch to NetSuite for half of what they pay to Salesforce.com. Apparently this also includes service and support which is a pretty tempting deal. I can tell you right now, most customers I worked with were left dumb founded after they bought Salesforce. Most people were puzzled because when they thought they bought into Software as a Service, they really got software but no service.

Offer expires at the end of the year. Click here for more information.

Thanks Wayne

What do most people expect during the annual Microsoft Professional Developers Conference? Most are probably expecting a new version of .NET or Visual Studio. This year however, I think many industry watchers will be surprised.

The energy was definitely upbeat at the company meeting a few weeks ago. There are a lot of products in the pipeline that I’m very excited about. And I’m not talking about Windows 7.

Some think that Microsoft just doesn’t get software services. But maybe after next week, many will change their opinions.

PDC is from October 27th - 30th. I’ll try to update this blog with the latest announcements.

I didn’t see this out there already so I thought I’d share it. It’s very short notice, but Salesforce.com is hosting a free webinar on building a successful SaaS company. The presenters are Byron Deeter and Mark Trang. Byron is a Partner at VC firm Bessemer Venture and Mark is Director of ISV Marketing & Programs.

Both of them will discuss the following topics:

• Identify the right business goals and metrics to focus on
• Preserve cash flow while safeguarding growth
• Develop effective strategies for distribution and expansion

Webinar is on October 8th at 11 AM Pacific Time.

Click here for more information and to register.

For those wondering why I dropped off the face of the earth and haven’t made a post in over a month, here’s an update of what I’ve been up to.

In August, I packed up all my things and moved to Seattle. I’m actually now back at Microsoft working as a Program Manager in Windows Live. I’ve returned to the team where I did my internship and I’m loving it.

This doesn’t change the fact that I’m avid watcher of this space and a big believer in the SaaS model. I guess this is just how the cards were dealt. I plan on posting often and keeping this blog going. Hopefully it provides as much value to you guys as it does for me.

By now you have heard of Chrome, Google’s browser that is set to break JavaScript rendering speeds. There’s plenty of articles on the web about the good, the bad, and the ugly of Chrome; so I won’t get into that. However, Microsoft seems to have been shaken up slightly - in another area than browser wars.

This article from CNET called Chrome’s JavaScript challenge to Silverlight gives a quick insight into what Microsoft is thinking. Silverlight is Microsoft’s Flash “killer” and it has been gaining momentum in the past couple of years. One of the features that Chrome set out to do was to make JavaScript rendering faster than in other browsers (and in the process making all Google Apps faster). Here is some proof that Google is on its way to achieving that. Well, now that we have faster and faster JavaScript, what’s going to happen to Flash and Silverlight? If JavaScript is faster than Silverlight, maybe that will become the programming framework of choice. That is what Microsoft’s Silverlight team is getting anxious about.

Joel Spolsky had a good post (”Strategy Letter VI”) relating to this about half a year ago. In a section of his post he said, as time goes on, technology will only get better and faster. This is what I interpreted from it: JavaScript may be “slow” now, but that doesn’t mean you should limit yourself to technologies that are fast today. Build your software the way you WANT it to be, and the speed of the technology will catch up. By that time you will have developed your super-cool application, while everybody else will be re-coding their old applications to use the full capabilities of the new speeds.

And here we are. Chrome is out, setting new speeds for rendering AJAX; and Silverlight has met a new competitor.

Just catching up on my blogs and I found this really interesting article on TechCrunchIT thanks to Michael at Salesforcetimes.

Basically this is a guest article written by the maverick himself; Marc Benioff. Long story short:
Web 1.0 was about getting businesses and people online to ‘transact’ or lookup information. Web 2.0 was about getting users involved in the process. Getting users to blog, upload/tag pictures, Digg pages and contribute to wikis. Although each wave operates in an overlapping and simultaneous manner, Web 3.0 is emerging on the horizon.

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There were 2 very interesting SaaS discussions organized during the Always On Summit at Stanford. One session was titled ‘Will the Next Salesforce.com Please Stand Up?’ and the other was titled ‘Will SaaS Disappear in the Cloud?’

Both discussions were focused on the future of SaaS and where the industry is heading. The discussions surrounded the questions of “Why is SaaS having trouble entering the enterprise space?” and in particular, “Why hasn’t there been another breakthrough company like Salesforce.com who has penetration in the enterprise?”

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