Well, here we are folks – it’s been a couple of months, and it has been an extremely busy time with family (the kids are out of school for the summer) and xLerate (not to boast, but we’ve been at over 100 percent billable for the past two months, with the docket in July and August looking mighty full as well!). This has all led to the lack of a post for a while, and my apologies to those who follow my rants here. I promise to start up the timesavers again in September – the summer just looks too busy, and who wants to save time in the dog days! 😉
I do feel I need to comment on one area happening in salesforce.com land right now, and this is the patent lawsuits occurring between Microsoft and salesforce.com. In mid-May, Microsoft sued salesforce.com for 9 patent infringements. Now, reading these infringements were hilarious, but what part of law suits aren’t! And the fact that you could patent navigational bars on a website just made my ribs hurt with laughter. This lawsuit led Marc Benioff to characterize Microsoft as “patent trolls“, and comments have been flung back and forth for the past six weeks from both sides.
Now, we come to this past week and salesforce.com’s official rebuttal to the May 19th lawsuit. In turn, salesforce.com has counter sued Microsoft with patent infringements based around .net and SharePoint. Going one step further, salesforce.com has hired David Boies, the lawyer who represented the US Department of Justice in their antitrust case against Microsoft.
I am not going to say that I’m behind Team Cloud on this one, because I am not. I am also not behind Team Redwood either. The actual thought of these two competitors (and yes, they are going toe to toe right now in the midsized CRM space right now) taking the next two to five years and fighting this through to the end sickens me to no end. There are those that say the salesforce.com sued to try and bring Microsoft to the negotiating table. I ask you this, for those who have been part of the salesforce.com world for some time. Does Marc Benioff seem like the negotiating type to you? Really? I didn’t think so. On the flip side of the lawsuit coin, we have all heard of Microsoft’s treasure chest of moneys. They aren’t afraid of the time this lawsuit could take, and Steve Ballmer scares the living hell out of me.
One of the wonders of working exclusively with salesforce.com for the past many years has been watching the amazing growth of features and innovation that has come from the lads at salesforce.com. It has been absolutely astonishing to watch how much innovation and imagination can come to production in such a short time. SalesLogix, a popular CRM back in it’s day was on Version 6 for at least 7 years before Version 7 was released. However, will salesforce.com still have the focus, and premise to continue pumping out leading edge technologies for cloud computing and CRM with a large, drag out lawsuit hanging over 1 Embarcadero for the next little while. While one may think I may going overboard on this thought, I am simply looking at what the possibility (and when looking at the main players and companies, I think it is a good possibility) is. And any lawsuit will hurt us, the users. I quote Eric Von Hippel, an MIT professor in technology innovation –
“The net effect (of patent lawsuits) is that they decrease innovation, and in the end, the public loses out”.
Just my thoughts on the whole subject. And you have no idea how much I hope I am wrong…
Nik
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