SugarCRM – Competing at Dreamforce
Written by ShamrockCRM on November 18, 2009 – 3:01 pm -During the confusion at Dreamforce at an “official-looking” book called “Behind the Smoke Screen” was handed to me.
The book is SugarCRM’s satire of Salesforce.com. The first chapter is about “How to use Salesforce.com to close a time-sensitive deals” which is a Salesfore.com error message, stating that Salesforce.com will be unavailable for 8 hours. Interestingly, today at the Dreamforce Keynote by Marc Benioff, he stated that Salesforce.com was going to be using a new method of data updates, using a mixture of 2 data centers, trading from one to the other during updates, creating shortages of only 5 minutes, as compared to 5 hours.
Chapter 2 is “What Salesforce.com Knows about Cloud Computing”. The page is blank – cute.
Chapter 3 is “Customer Success” which states, “Sorry, this feature is not available in this edition. Please contact your sales representative to upgrade.” It’s true, Salesforce.com does have different editions for different needs.
Chapter 4, “Simple Steps to Creating Force.com Applications” is a maze leading to dollar symbols $$.
Chapter 5 is entitled “Investing in Innovation” which is a fake check to Oracle.
Chapter 6 is “About this Book” which says “You do not own this book or the information therein. If you would like an extract of the information, a massive CSV file might be sent to you within 60 to 90 days.
The rest of the book is empty pages. In fact only half the pages even have lines. Looking up this book online, I find that Sugar CRM has paid for 1,000 copies to hand out at Dreamforce. Considering the 19,000 that are at Dreamforce, that isn’t quite enough. However, the fact that even 1,000 were printed is kind of appalling, as the amount of paper that was wasted simply to satire Salesforce in less than 100 words is not very eco-conscious.
Related posts:
- Salesforce.com Dreamforce Helpful Links
- Dreamforce 2010 – 6 days and counting
- Small Business Tips from Dreamforce
- Watch the Dreamforce Keynote Video
- Shamrock CRM to be blogging at Dreamforce 2009
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