I can understand building an open-source operating system.

It will provide the same kind of professional test environment that IT has behind the firewall. IT has come to take that for granted.

This is the future. It makes it cheaper and easier for all kinds of companies to build apps, whether you're talking about enterprises or small businesses.

They alluded to that, but we needed much more information.

There are a lot of vendors out there trying to be cheaper than Salesforce.com or trying to offer more or different features. That is not the best way to compete against a market leader, though. Instead, you have to be offering something that is truly special.

There are over 200 nifty new things in this release, but it's not simply about adding features--it's about changing the orientation of the product. You can only go so far in building an SFA engine before you reach diminishing returns. The next logical thing in SFA is to improve inputs into SFA.

We are only at the beginning of getting the large enterprises involved in this.

Managing sales compensation has always been a difficult task. As products and product configurations continue to get more complex, more and more companies are trying to use incentives as a way to drive specific behaviors. There are so many variables to this that compensation challenges mount to the point where traditional solutions like spreadsheets no longer provide an adequate remedy.

It is (a) new platform and a new way to build applications that might not have been conceived before.

From what I've seen, I think the competitors blew the opportunity. They used it as an opportunity to strut their stuff and say how great they are. It would have been smart for at least one of them to take the high road and do something like offer emergency service using their product for free for example.