Comment by ig1
15 years ago
Or more likely distraction from their core CRM business would have made it difficult to compete, Siebel and SAP would have taken their high-end customers and Zoho their low end customers. Stuck between a pincer market move they would have been forced to sell to Oracle for a few hundred million dollars.
Salesforce five years wasn't anywhere near enough in the position that they could afford to throw tens of millions of dollars into a non-core product (which Amazon could easily do).
It easy to point out opportunities missed without looking at the cost of those opportunities.
"core CRM business"
They started promoting PaaS (term they coined) ~4 years ago and the marketing dropped CRM to focus on Salesforce being a 'cloud expert' (or leader). All of what Benioff has been saying around that time and up to today was Salesforce moving beyond CRM and into being 'cloud' and 'platform'.
I remember him having a slide in one presentation where it showed "CRM ==> Platform ==> PaaS", or something similar, showing Salesforce development and roadmap.
Problem was, for them it meant providing more apps and the app platform and building it themselves, rather than providing the tools to allow developers to build out their platform for them. A bit like Microsoft not having Visual Studio and MSDN.