The Register has posted more details. The filing[pdf] lists nine counts of alleged infringement:

1. Method for mapping between logical data and physical data

2. System and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu

3. Method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display

4. Automated web site creation using template driven generation of active server page applications

5. Aggregation of system settings into objects

6. Timing and velocity control for displaying graphical information (2 counts)

7. Method and system for identifying and obtaining computer software from a remote computer

8. System and method for controlling access to data entities in a computer network

I make no comment on the legal validity of these claims. On the broader issue though, Microsoft says this:

Microsoft has been a leader and innovator in the software industry for decades and continues to invest billions of dollars each year in bringing great software products and services to market. We have a responsibility to our customers, partners, and shareholders to safeguard that investment, and therefore cannot stand idly by when others infringe our IP rights

My observation is that I have seen Salesforce.com shake up the industry by making its multi-tenant online application and platform work for its customers. Although there are some parallels, the Salesforce.com platform is more radical than Microsoft Azure and has more potential to reduce costs, because it is based on a single shared application, rather than being a hosted platform for custom applications. The differences are not absolute, because the Force.com platform also supports custom applications, and Microsoft also offers multi-tenanted applications, but if you look at the core propositions the distinction is valid.

Again, I have no idea what the legal outcome will be, but from a public relations perspective this does not look good for Microsoft. It raises the question: is Microsoft litigating because it cannot succeed in the market?

Small companies and patent trolls sue large companies because they have little to lose, and potentially a lot to gain. Large companies show more restraint. I have always assumed that there are thousands of plausible patent infringements among the largest technology companies, and that the industry would descend into a kind of litigation meltdown if all of them were pursued, to nobody’s benefit other than lawyers.

The question then: why is Microsoft going after Salesforce.com now?

Related posts:

1. Open season for patent litigation makes case for reform
2. More patent nonsense: Microsoft loses in Office custom XML appeal
3. Making sense of Salesforce.com

A developer preview will be available in the second half of 2010; no date is yet announced for the final release.

There are a couple of different ways to look at this announcement. From the perspective of a Force.com developer, it means that full Java is now available alongside the existing Apex language. That will make it easier to port code and use existing skills. From the perspective of a Java developer looking for a hosted deployment platform, it means another strong contender alongside others such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

The trade-off is that with Amazon EC2 you have pretty much full control over what you deploy on Amazon’s servers. VMforce is a more restricted platform; you will not be able to install what you like, but have to run on what is provided. The advantage is that more of the management burden is lifted; VMforce will even handle backup.

I could not get any information about pricing or even how the new platform will be charged. I suspect it will compete more on quality than on price. However I was told that smooth scalability is a key goal.

More information here.

Related posts:

1. Salesforce.com partners with Adobe for Flash Builder for Force.com
2. Salesforce.com linking with Facebook, Amazon
3. VMWare: the cloud is private

The major theme of the conference was Chatter, which is being rolled out to Salesforce.com users next year. Chatter takes key features from Twitter, including status updates and followers, and integrates them with the platform. There is also a Facebook-like profile page for all users. We saw several possible applications for the feature:

• Keeping in touch with what colleagues are up to
• Keeping in touch with progress on specific projects or opportunities, which can have their own status feeds
• Using the Chatter mechanism as a commenting system, for example for collaborating on a draft document

There is a security mechanism, whereby alerts can be restricted to certain people or groups. You can also filter alerts to reduce noise.

We also saw a desktop client built with Adobe AIR, for monitoring status feeds in the same style as familiar Twitter clients.

While I don’t question the potential of Chatter, the current craze for Twitterising everything reminds me of the hype around RSS a few years back, which which it has many parallel. In the end it is another way to communicate, with better contextualisation than email and less vulnerability to spam.

Twitter itself has little chance of penetrating the Enterprise, when it is so easy to re-implement its essential features.

There was not much developer content here, sadly, though we did see a “30 minute Cloudforce application” in one of the sessions. It was all wizard-drive data form design, and strongly reminiscent of what we used to with the likes of Access and FileMaker, but all browser-hosted. One difference though is that the Salesforce platform has built-in workflow and approval. Another advantage is that you are in effect extending an application that already knows about your organisation’s users and contacts. The result is that working applications can be put together quickly, provided that they fit nicely with the platform model.

Related posts:

1. Salesforce.com = CRM + platform?
2. VMforce: Salesforce partners VMware to run Java in the cloud
3. Salesforce.com linking with Facebook, Amazon

I asked Dave Gruber from Adobe and Eric Stahl from salesforce.com what is really new here, since force.com has always exposed a SOAP web service API, and Flash Builder has the ability to import WSDL service descriptions in order to call them. In addition, a Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex has been available for some time.

Gruber explained that there is now a “custom interface to the Force API” that reduces the amount of code you have to write to wrap these services. In addition – and this may be more significant – some parts of LiveCycle Data Services have been integrated into the Force.com platform, including the data synchronisation piece. The illustration above shows an AIR application with a Sync tab, and this is the kind of online/offline application that should now be easier to build.

“We have a lot of customers asking us for that desktop connected, disconnected scenario. We want to give people a great set of tools for building those kind of apps,” says Stahl.

According to Gruber, Flex developers who want to take advantage of the new framework will have to purchase Flash Builder for Force.com even if they already have Adobe Flash Builder. “It’s a unique offering, this is not going to be built into the standard Flash Builder product”, he told me.

Salesforce.com has toolkits for many client platforms, but offering a custom IDE for Flex demonstrates a significant partnership. “Adobe is clearly the leader in rich internet applications, it’s a synergistic relationship,” says Stahl.

Related posts:

1. Adobe’s Flex Builder to Flash Builder name change does not go far enough
2. Adobe news: Flash Builder 4, Creative Suite 5, quarterly results
3. Salesforce.com hints at Adobe Flex support

A sinagelive display could be a low-powered network-connected device attached to a display; or a display alone with enough intelligence to retrieve a Media RSS feed and display its images; what you can do in the home with something like a estarling connected photo frame or a PhotoVu wireless digital picture frame but with bigger displays. The company is looking forward to displays which include on-chip Adobe Flash players since this will enable animation and video to be included with little extra cost. The media itself is currently stored on company servers, but is likely to move to Amazon S3 in future – which makes sense for scalability, pay as you go, and for taking advantage of Amazon’s global network, reducing latency.

If you want to see an example, apparently the London Dockland Light Railway screens are driven by signagelive; they are also in Harrods.

CEO Jason Cremlins has a blog post about the future of DOOH. My further thought is that if you had devices able to run Flash applications, you could put this together with touch screens and add interactivity to the mix.

The boundaries between internet and non-internet advertising are blurring. Ad networks such as those run by Google can be extended to networks using this kind of technology in a blink. Why shouldn’t advertisers be able to select airport lounges or underground stations alongside Adsense for websites?

The less compelling aspect of the technology is that as the costs of running these advertising networks come down, the likelihood of intrusive advertising screens invading every possible public space increases.

I also found this interesting as an innovative use of the Salesforce platform. As I recall, it hooks into other force.com applications to handle billing, customer record management and so on, and shows the potential for Salesforce to move beyond CRM. With the Adobe Flash aspect as well this example brings together a number of themes that I’ve been mulling over and I enjoyed hearing about it.

Related posts:

1. Salesforce.com partners with Adobe for Flash Builder for Force.com
2. The battle to be part of the emerging cloud stack: Force.com for Google App Engine
3. Salesforce.com = CRM + platform?

There are several elements to Service Cloud 2, which puts customer service alongside CRM as a core Salesforce offering. Traditional call centres are last-century technology, says Benioff, and today’s customers go to Google, Facebook or Twitter before picking up the phone. Salesforce Knowledge is a multi-tenant knowledgebase – a specialist type of content management system – that hooks into a customer service online dashboard as well as being exposed to Google etc. Salesforce Answers is a:

complete, customisable website that facilitates question/answer style conversations between customers

The idea is to promote interaction with customers and to feedback customer knowledge (since they often provide the best support) into the knowledgebase. Salesforce Answers can be published as a Facebook site as well as on the Web. Another feature is the ability to monitor twitter, pick up what people are saying about your product, and intervene as appropriate. You can also have a twitter account to which customers can address queries.

If customers do in fact pick the phone, the same information along with customer details can be used to offer support.

We saw an impressive demo based on Dell.com’s Salesforce application – Dell is a big Salesforce customer and CEO Michael Dell a friend of Benioff. A customer calls in and all their details, purchase and support history pops up automatically based, presumably, on their incoming number. A few quick taps and the representative is able to answer their question. You would imagine that every competent call centre has a similar arrangement – having said which, we’ve all had experience of call centres where you are passed from rep to rep repeating our details and our problem with each new contact. We also saw a Facebook page and Twitter encounter where a customer got quick and accurate responses. Of course the demo problems were nice easy ones like “How do I fit more RAM”, not more intricate ones like “why does Windows freeze every third time I boot”.

The core of the Salesforce proposition is that multi-tenant applications are more cost-effective than traditional in-house IT. The most striking statistic Benioff offered is that they support 63,000 customers on just 1500 Dell PCs. “What a scam traditional IT is”, said Benioff, referring to the low utilisation of most in-house servers – though virtualisation also goes some way towards solving this problem.

One of Benioff’s tips for success is to bring customers and prospects together for informal marketing, and this launch was an example. It was hosted at the London Stock Exchange, a great location for a business-oriented presentation, and I was surrounded by men in suits, unlike the informal attire at the more technology-focussed events I attend.

At the party afterwards there was a piece of marketing genius. Smiling staff circulated the party with armfuls of Flip video cameras. Guests were asked to say something about Salesforce.com into the camera – questions like “How has using Salesforce impacted your business” – and to agree to allow their piece to be used in marketing. In return they got a camera. I wonder if the company will disclose that last piece of information alongside the comments?

Disclosure: I got a Flip too.

While most customers are positive, I did hear some grumbles as well. Cost is one: while you save on infrastructure cost, the Salesforce model is not necessarily cheap, and extras like training are a significant cost. I also heard how the system sometimes fails, not with downtime as such, but with things like scheduled data exports (for backup) failing to run; I presume these are resource hogs and get shunted out of the way to keep the system responsive for immediate transactions. I also heard that the platform now has its own legacy and that some things work in odd ways because they are too difficult to change.

Another worry is lack of control. If something goes wrong, there is nothing you can do beyond harrying support. One customer said it was like being on a train that is late. If you are between stations you cannot even get off the train.

Still, I believe the cloud is the future because of sheer economics; it is more cost-effective. Further, when it comes to multi-tenanted applications Salesforce.com is undoubtedly the leader in its segment.

I spoke to another customer about a particularly interesting use of the platform and will post about that separately.

Related posts:

1. In which I ask Marc Benioff, CEO Salesforce.com, if his platform is a lock-in
2. Marc Benioff: Google deal is aimed at a common enemy
3. Salesforce Chatter: Twitter-like status updates for the Enterprise

The Java toolkit supports the complete Partner WSDL of the Force.com Web Services API. All operations and objects are included in the library and documentation. If you are a Java developer, you can also leverage the Java resources found here.

whereas the Python toolkit only supports “many of the key Force.com Web Services API calls”. I suspect the Java toolkit will have more impact, because it is the language and platform many Enterprises already use for application development.

On the other side, there is also a Google Data API Toolkit for Force.com.

Why is Salesforce.com cosying up to Google? The way I see it, there is an emerging cloud stack and vendors need to be part of that stack or be marginalized.

What’s a cloud stack? You can interpret what the expression means in various ways. Sam Johnston has a go at it here, identifying 6 layers:

• Infrastructure
• Storage
• Platform
• Application
• Services
• Clients

There isn’t a single cloud stack, and all parts of it are available from multiple vendors as well as from open source. It is a major shift in the industry though, and there is no reason to think that the same vendors who currently succeed in the on-premise stack will also succeed in the cloud stack, rather the contrary. You could describe the RIA wars (Adobe Flash vs browser vs Silverlight) as a battle for share of the client stack, for example, and one in which Microsoft is unlikely to win as much share as it has enjoyed with Windows.

By positioning itself as a platform that integrates well with Google App Engine, Salesforce.com is betting that Google will continue to be an important player, and that it will pay to be perceived as complementary to its platform.

A factor which holds back Force.com adoption is that it is expensive. Developers can experiment for free, but rolling out a live application means subscriptions for all your users. Getting started with App Engine, on the other hand, is free, with fees kicking in only after you have succeeded sufficiently that you are generating substantial traffic (and hopefully making or saving some money).

Related posts:

1. Salesforce.com partners with Adobe for Flash Builder for Force.com
2. Google App Engine: how much will you pay for freedom?
3. VMforce: Salesforce partners VMware to run Java in the cloud

A question I’ve asked a couple of times is whether Salesforce.com gives any assurance to its 3rd party partners that it will not compete with them by rolling into its core platform features similar to those in an AppExchange offering. I’ve not received a clear answer, though EMEA co-president Lyndsey Armstrong told me last year that it just was not an issue; and Benioff today at Cloudforce told me it has not proved to be a problem so far. It is an interesting question though, since if Salesforce.com did choose to expand into new application areas, this kind of competition would be all-but inevitable. It therefore seems to me that the company is more interested in growing its platform business, and continuing to grow its CRM business, than in addressing new kinds of online applications itself. There were also broad hints today that the company intends to improve its platform as an application server.

Let’s speculate for a moment. What if Salesforce gets acquired, say by Oracle, a move which would not be unexpected? If such a thing happened, it would make sense for existing Oracle applications like the E-business Suite or PeopleSoft Enterprise to get extended or merged or migrated into Force.com. That might be less comfortable for AppExchange 3rd parties.

Related posts:

1. In which I ask Marc Benioff, CEO Salesforce.com, if his platform is a lock-in
2. Salesforce.com + Google + Adobe Flex and AIR = New Internet platform?
3. Making sense of Salesforce.com

The consumer perspective is to do with running applications and storing your stuff on the Internet. Gmail, Google Docs, Skydrive, are all examples of doing cloud-based computing from a consumer perspective. Somehow we brought BBC iPlayer, Facebook and YouTube into the mix as well. Some think that the home computer will disappear, replaced by Internet-connected appliances and devices.

The small business and entrepreneur’s perspective is to do with low start-up costs and low barriers to entry. Anyone can run a web site, take payments with PayPal or Amazon Payment Services or Google Checkout, and use cloud services for email and collaboration.

The larger business or enterprise perspective is do with exporting IT infrastructure to the Internet. Close your data centre, sell your servers, move your computing to virtual servers running on Amazon’s elastic compute cloud or some such. There is not much of this happening as far as I can see, though we are seeing virtualization (which might be a first step), and some take-up for software-as-a-service (SAAS) applications like Salesforce.com.

I suppose it is appropriate that the cloud term is fluffy. To some it is synonymous with the Internet; to others it means SAAS applications; to others it means virtual servers running who knows what; to others it means a hosted application platform (platform-as-a-service or PAAS).

The problem with vague terms is that they make discussion difficult.

My favourite usage: cloud computing means exporting IT infrastructure to the Internet.

Related posts:

1. Cloud Computing survey: more fog than cloud
2. Amazon’s cloud computing to surpass its retailing business?
3. OpenStack takes on Amazon with open source cloud computing

I thought it would be interesting to compare the image quality, so I took a snap across the study (without a tripod). It’s difficult to compare like with like, as the newer camera supports higher resolutions. In the end I decided to use each one at its best resolution. The books in the image are around 3 metres (10 feet) away. Here’s the IXUS 400, image enlarged to match the size of the other:

and here is the IXUS 80IS:

Note that this is a very small detail; the old camera is not that bad. Still, a big difference.

Incidentally, I posted my first picture to Flickr earlier today – a snap of the Foo Fighters at Dreamforce last year. Taken with the old Canon, of course.

Related posts:

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3. Canon Exposed