We Are The World
Google announced an alliance with Salesforce, which supplies sales software functionality on the web. Salesforce will reciprocate by promoting Google AdWords, which are also coming to Google Maps. Marc Orchant from Office Evolution comments, "I suppose this was inevitable and will potentially be useful if done right. Still, the creepy feeling remains. It’s turning into a Google world my friends."
Slowly but surely application functionality is migrating out of the single desktop or office LAN into services provided by Third Parties. One more step to the day when your entire computer is "out there", where "out there" is not a physical location in any permanent sense. When the change finally occurs, connectivity will be paramount. It will be like air which you need to breathe in and out whether conscious of it or not.
posted by wretchardthecat at 6/05/2007 03:26:00 PM
4 Comments:
I do internet marketing for a living. I can do it anywhere. Its a little wierd. But I wouldn't go back to the office. The most interesting places I have worked so far this year have been in order: 1.)on the north shore of oahu at Shark's Cove while watching whales. 2.)At the airport in Denver. 3.) In a farm house in central Pennsylvania.4.)In a conference hall in a downtown hotel in Washington DC while listening to Newt Gingrich.
Welcome to an ever-expanding club. I work from anywhere I can get onto the Internet. That can include an airport hotel at JFK, a motel in the Snowy Mountains or a random building in Manhattan. Israel, Hong Kong. Anywhere there's a broadband connection. In some places I can actually work from a moving vehicle.
I am sometimes asked "what country are you in now"? This location-neutrality is becoming more common and pretty soon we won't be first adopters any more. This is the way the world will largely work in a few years.
Certain peripherals become consequent desirables. I normally pack a digital camera (which can record sound, like a taperecorder or VGA video in addition to stills), a headset and a porable webcam. Certain laptop attributes become very desirable. Portability. Long, long battery life and a spare battery in the bag to boot. Right now, the whole deal weighs about six pounds including grungy backpack, which is good because you don't look like such an attractive mark in the Third World.
In my own opinion the availability of wireless broadband will be one of the major desiderata of any destination, if it is not already.
One would imagine that with complete mobility available people will be constantly on the move. But counterintuitively in my case I find myself moving around less. This is because the communication facilities available from the modern computer make it possible to communicate in such a plethora of ways -- email, IM, videoconferencing, VOIP -- that you can literally span the world from your keyboard.
I imagine that as more people get mobile broadband and become accessible anywhere they choose to there will be less and less reason to travel for routine business. We will all be face to face, though we may never see each other in the flesh.
Although info technology is my passion, investing is where the rubber hits the road. This announcement led to an $11 rise in the price of GOOG stock, which on a base of 315 million share outstanding, yielded a $3 + Billion gain, which would cover at least half the purchase price of Salesforce.com (something in the $80-100 range). A merger of the two would probably yield value accretion to both, resulting in a competely selfunding transaction. Would it hold? In the long run absolutetly. See Mike Arringon's piece re: same at Tech Crunch. These two companies are highly synergistic- far more so than any other conceivable combination.
In summary, SFDC has the entree to the enterprise that Google lacks, as well as the salesforce to push other product through that channel. Google has the ad dominance to overlay ontop of SFDC's business model to provide it with the real juice it needs to win long term.
and not let us end with kumbaya!
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