I take your remaining points to heart, and in fact they reinforce what I have been writing about and speaking about, enterprise software needs to change, but not because of new competitors but because of new opportunities.

Certainly Salesforce petulance serves them well. Nothing legitimized Salesforce so fast as Siebel’s “ondemand” investment/offering. Respect and share follow when they pick a public fight and land some legitimate blows against larger players. Since ORCL is not worthy in apps, this leaves only SAP and MSFT today, perhaps GOOG or others tomorrow. Such is the price of being the unrefutable market leading solution on every measure – share functionality, # users, # industries, % of software industry profits, etc. Unlike ORCl whose leader truly enjoys being predatory and desires monopolistic advantage despite customer value, I do believe MarcB innovates in line with market and customer value as best he can from his limited view of the truly global enterprise.

This author shares your frustration as Salesforce should have more productively engaged the panel/audience on how Web2.0 can meaningfully engage the enterprise. If you and Adam worked offline to create and deliver a joint presentation, you could reach an audience of 4000, not 40. Moreover, your respective customers would participate and help guide your investments, along with the thriving ecosystem. Call him out and let some mutually agreed upon moderator set the agenda to keep it fact and value based. An honest debate will raise the quality of the game for both companies and move the conversation from petulance to productive discourse. ( I am not calling you or your comments petulant; I have seen only thoughtful, professional, honest dialog.) For example, choose a mutually convenient competitor, like MSFT and discuss how Web2.0 constructs in Zimbra and Writely have genuinely innovated user value compared to their over the Outlook and Word monopolies. This can help raise collective awareness and direct investment towards the legitmiate power of Web2.0.

Capitalism is very efficent and we stay comfortable in our share leadership at great peril. Pre-cellphone era, surely Motorola never anticipated their lock on wireless communication would be threatened by a couple firms in central Finland. Nor did any legitmate player in the pre-client server era believe ORCL could disintermediate IBM’s proprietary systems. My point is that market forces at work again in our industry are ripe to disintermediate both SAP and CRM – the future combantants will not come from the shores you might expect.

Salesforce may be the OnDemand giant, but very vulnerable even as they approach $500m in annual revenues. They do appreciate and learned to cope with today’s market reality: the only thing you can monetize is usage and every login is another validation available for micropayments. To survive and perhaps thrive in this world does require multi-tenancy. However, it’s an unfair fight cause architectures in the late 70s and early 80s (when SAP began was taking share) did not permit it. I do submit that IF SAP customers could choose to install or host but SAP only got paid monthly based on usage, SAP would only support multi-tenacy.

Similarly, it’s not fair for you to suggest that SAP users willingly choose to use SAP; the preponderance of your users in AP, procurement and shipping never got a vote and cannot choose otherwise and keep their job.

The market forces will not reverse – buyers do not want to pay up front, front load their risk and pay the vendor and implementors in advance for uncertain benefits. Salesforce has found a way to live in that world. The market at large can learn some things from their innovations. As the anchor tenant in our marketplace, SAP benefits most by investing in the dialog. Salesforce becomes “OnDemand 1.0″ unless they learn ever more compelling user experience and more progressive architectures that permit onboarding and viral adoption at less than 50% of revenues going to sales and marketing.

In the new world we must continuously innovate the user experience until no consulting is required to make it work for your company. If we envision a market where each enterprise user pays only $1 a module for life, then we can avoid becoming the recording industry having just been “iTuned”.

thanks for listening to my rant

Good v. Evil is a vast oversimplification that is a crutch of the intellectually weak. It is as true in Marketing as it is in Politics. Be thankful Adam has no real power and is, therefore, not dangerous.