Dreamforce 2011

I'm here getting ready for the afternoon keynote address at Dreamforce, salesforce.com's premier conference event, with Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, and Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman at Google.  This is an interesting combination as it seems to me that cloud provider Salesforce, with offerings like Force.com and Heroku, is a direct competitor to Google's App Engine.  We'll see what goes on in this interaction.

My view from 50 yards.

With 45,000 registered attendees, Dreamforce is one serious sales pitch conference.  I've come to appreciate where salesforce.com excels...and where it does not.  While Force.com is touted as a fully-featured cloud platform on which to build any application you can dream of, it feels wrong.  Salesforce is a highly successful CRM turned customizable.  Then had feature upon feature added until it became an extendable platform.  But just because you can build anything* you want on it, doesn't mean you should.

* A salesforce sales executive was quick to point out that you can't build a 3D first-person shooter.  I love contrived examples which skirt around real issues.




On to the interview.


Eric Schmidt:

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A flexible platform allows you to continually get better.  That's against all engineering

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Picking the best data centers helped Google attract the best talent.  Location = success?

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The people who want the benefit of the platform have...a high incentive to stay within the boundaries of the api. [Also motivated to help the momentum of the platform.]

"
Latest Android OS internally known as "Ice-cream Sandwich."

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Apple is the rare company that can move to a new platform, and get it right.

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Mobile, Local, Social

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Mobile first...the top programmers are developing mobile apps first.

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The thing I love about the Internet is that everyone feels like they can be heard, and nothing changes.  ~Being heard is no longer a sign of activism.

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America needs to be a manufacturer.  We have to. [...] We have to find a way to get the quality up.  "Activism should be judged based on outcomes"

Internet vs. oppresive regimes: Internet has a pretty fair fight.  Shutting down Internet in Egypt was probably a mistake because it signaled to the average citizen of Egypt that something was really wrong.

"
Americans were really harmed in 2008, and yet no one has really had to pay a price for that.