EightBlack.

This from the US edition of the Wall Street Journal and also ZDNet and Techcrunch.

Rumours have been swirling around now for a month or so regarding a possible tie up between Salesforce and Google but yesterday it reached boiling point. The market cap of Salesforce, one of the premium web based CRM providers around (if there is such a thing) is hovering around the US$5.4 billion mark, so it wont come cheap to Google, but its obviously not out of their reach.

I’m no fan of CRM and my past experience with People Soft and SAP, 2 of the industry titans, leaves me cold and depressed. CRM (and I’m quoting from Tom Peters) is probably the most failed, most hyped and most expensive foray into sales management software by the B2B market in last 10 years or so. It’s not that the products or applications are flawed - its the often completely screwed up, way over budget implementation that kills it.

I’m yet to find any corporate manager, who when asked about their company CRM application, says anything positive. But that just may be me.

Google’s pushing hard into the corporate space and the recent acquisition of DoubleClick amongst others proves to me that this is where they know they need to head. I dont care what anyone says, Google is after the business market and while they wont openly come out and declare war on Microsoft, they’ll keep forging ahead and use the best spin doctors in the country to keep telling eveyone that Google Apps is really not a competitor to MS Office.

I just dont know though what they will do with something as elastic as CRM. If nothing else, the Salesforce customer base will provide them with a very good sales and marketing channel.

Google’s a bit like my 6 year old son. My 4 year old daughter will be standing there, shrieking to a point where glass is about to shatter, distraught at the fact that her older brother has ripped the head off her barbie doll. Or something like that.

“Did you do that?”

“No…” comes the reply (he’s been trained by the same PR folks as Bill Clinton).

“Well, how did it happen…?”

“By osmosis” he says.

No matter who’s asking, Google will continue to flatly deny that they want any part of Microsofts business or market. Meanwhile, they go out and buy an ad distribution network, and are now considering the hottest CRM business. The wires are saying that a sale or acquisition is out of the question and that a JV will more likely be the outcome.

I’m going to be at Google this Wednesday at Mountain View. I’ll try and ask some folks towards the end of my visit, as I dont want to get thrown out of the place before I start.

And you can just bet Steve Ballmer will throw more than a chair if Google does end up buying Salesforce.

Let me know what you think?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 12:27 am and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.