The Willys Jeep v. SaaS
June 5, 2008
This has got to go up in the SFBlogged today, the coincidence is just too great for me to ignore.
A few weeks ago I was talking with Adam Killam and I just mentioned off-hand that I’d had a chance to look over General Motor’s stock info recently (NYSE:GM) and that it bore a striking resemblance to Salesforce.com’s (NYSE:CRM). It struck me as kind of a peculiar thing about the markets that a “software” company founded in 1999 could be comparable in any way to a vehicle manufacturer who produced a light truck that Eisenhower himself admitted was an essential part of fighting and winning World War 2.
I guess the silent parallel this guy is drawing here is; the Willys Jeep underwent hundreds upon hundreds of modifications at the hands of every army that got ahold of one. Every allied nation had Willys in their armed forces, and whether it was skiis or rocket launchers every one of these things were custom tooled to do the exactly job that needed to get done. Sound like anything familiar?
Part one of “mwilson”’s post is here.
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Interesting corollary. IMO the car industry has faltered for the precise reasons that companies like Salesforce.com have succeeded.
(1) Platforms - Salesforce has built a platform and allowed customers to build/tweak on top of it
(2) Passion - Salesforce has a call to arms…”the end of software”. GM’s current call to arms, “don’t die” which enspires you
(3) Customization - Built on the platform pillar, Salesforce now allows you to build ANY tool on their platform. Could the car industry pull that off (umm..hello…Scion?)
Salesforce.com fundamentally changed the “software” industry by offering something completely new, built around a customizable platform and a passion with a call to action. The auto industry is still “trying to keep up with Japan” and are failing.
To sound like Tom Peters…go where the competition is not. What about a collaborative platform car(s) customized to my needs/wants? What about just flat beating the Japanese to the punch on electric or fuel cell technology?
This should be our generations “Land a Man on the Moon” call to action.
This makes me laugh…comparing a bloated stock and soon to be doomed company like SFDC to GM is reaching beyond belief. Salesforce simply does not have anything to support its hugely inflated stock price and market valuation…
One thing I will agree to, somewhat, Salesforce’s model IS EXACTLY the GM model…assembly line crap that users cannot customize in any valuable fashion - unless of course you pay for proprietary GM/SFDC parts (or dev languages that are closed and useless). This is NOT A GOOD THING when it comes to software.
Salesforce.com will fail, and soon, because it has built up a monolithic multi-tenant infrastructure that cannot scale to meet partners needs (so no fast vertical or international expansion) or true enterprise needs (managing multiple data sets, locations, etc in a true enterprise IT fashion)
Salesforce is GM, Detroit, etc….Open source CRM is Japan and the hybrid of the applications world that will send Salesforce crashing…
Hi Max,
Thanks for the comments. It would be interesting to hear from you on “true enterprise needs” as you called them. If you’d like to submit an article on the above points explaining each in more detail I think it would be interesting for readers and possibly some great feedback for Salesforce.com.
It would also be interesting to hear from you what a solution would look like instead of jumping on the bandwagon of “this sucks and here’s why” that so many people take when commenting on blogs these days.
Cheers - hope to see an article from you soon.
Adam