If you are a Salesforce.com customer, consider yourself officially blessed with Google Apps right in your Salesforce.com world. What does this mean in simple terms?
If I were in Microsoft land right now, I’d be a bit worried. Okay, really worried. Here is a video tour from Salesforce.com.
Putting Google Docs into Salesforce.com means seriously convenient document collaboration. A better experience than what MS-Office can provide, at least for collaboration. Integrating this into the sales cycle can lead to amazing productivity gains and improved service. And adding Gmail and Google Calendar to Salesforce.com means small businesses have one less reason to use Exchange Server.
The combination of two big gorilla web platforms creates something very threatening to Microsoft. Yes, Salesforce.com probably could have created its own version of the Google products. But the alliance with Google means enterprise customers have a path to running entirely through web-based services. And both companies are looking to advance the web as a platform.
Also interesting to note, this wasn’t so much a business deal, but a feature requested by Salesforce.com users through their Idea Exchange which evolved into a great opportunity for two companies.
(If you are a Salesforce.com user, add a comment with your thoughts…)