Update: The Gang is scheduled to start around 1:30pm.
From the inside out, salesforce.com is a rapidly growing cloud computing company at the head of the enterprise social wave. From the outside in, the company’s annual Dreamforce conference has landed in downtown San Francisco on the Moscone Center campus. Each year the conference grows in size, with more than 45,000 attendees streaming in this year.
I’ve been employed at Salesforce for more than a year and a half, and in that time I’ve seen a steady march toward the goals that attracted me to the company. Many of these advances will be revealed over the course of the conference, freeing me at last to discuss and place them in the context of the Social Enterprise. With the coming release of iOS 5 and the continued advance of Android in the mobile space, the opportunity for using the social stream to improve our personal and business lives has never been more tangible.
Most notable in this moment is the collapse of Microsoft as a driving force in the evolution of technology. Whether it’s the reluctance to cannibalize existing Office and Windows revenue streams or the inability to fight off Android’s I’ll Take It From Here of the low end of the smart phone market, Microsoft has no serious club to bring down on anybody who wants to move from the desktop to the Tablet.
The problem is, no one cares about Windows. It’s so low in the stack most people don’t realize it’s there, and besides they’re spending most of the minutes of the day and night on Safari or Android or anything mobile. Anything but Windows is also followed closely by Anything but Office, and soon at a theater near you, Anything but Outlook. You may not believe it yet, but email is being routed around. Take my teenaged daughter, who lives in Facebook, or my youngest, who lives in FaceTime. Texting and Twitter.
The problem with email is more than the traditional spam firehose. It’s the lack of a social lense across the firehose of interruptions that stream unfettered into your devices. Without a sense of priority, the ability to triage in realtime, you’re at the mercy of the rapid buildout of social technologies that harvest the expanding concentric circles of your most trusted advisors. They are your friends, colleagues, partners, educators, thought leaders, and influencers of the stream. You follow them, @mention them, retweet and accelerate the dynamics of the implicit groups they form around and next to each of us.
This undulating stream of metadata informs the value and importance of these social objects in ways email can’t compete with. As social networks improve, we make investments in the multiple ways we can signal value to each other. The model has flipped from the InBox to the OutFollow; we register with more socially-aware constructs that mine our meta signals to construct a series of trust relationships built around a sharing model.
With the release of iOS 5 in a few short weeks, this socially-tuned priority stream has a powerful new home in the push notification queue. Instead of leaving one app to check email, we are notified in a non-interruptive drop down alert as things happen. As we let these alerts accumulate you can triage the messages you don’t respond to immediately. But realtime is not about reacting, it’s about absorbing a sense of the flow, the rhythm of the interactions between people, projects, reminders, collaborative ideas in the now. As with Chatter in the enterprise, you develop a subtle institutional memory that lets you stage news, documents, chats, video, even email, in a socially adaptive priority stream.
Robert Scoble is an American blogger, technical evangelist, and author. He is best known for his popular blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technical evangelist at Microsoft. Scoble joined Microsoft in 2003, and although he often promoted Microsoft products like Tablet PCs and Windows Vista, he also frequently criticized his own employer and praised its competitors like Apple and Google. Scoble is the author of Naked Conversations, a book on how blogs are changing...
Adam Bosworth is a technology leader and innovator who was instrumental in building numerous technology products, including Google Health, Microsoft Access, Microsoft Internet Explorer and BEA WebLogic Integration and Workshop. After facing serious family challenges with the health care system, Adam decided to transition from 25 years of building databases and software to apply this knowledge and pursue his passion for helping people become healthy and well. He founded Keas in 2008 to bring together the latest technology, medical information...
John Taschek is vice president of strategy at salesforce.com. He is responsible for corporate product strategy, corporate intelligence and market influence. Taschek came to company in 2003, bringing over 20 years of technology evaluation experience. Taschek currently is also the editorial director for CloudBlog - an independent blog run as an adjunct to salesforce.com’s web properties. He occasionally is on Steve Gillmor’s The Gillmor Gang enterprise web video-cast. Previously, Taschek ran the testing labs at eWEEK (formerly PC Week) magazine....
Steve Gillmor is a technology commentator, editor, and producer in the enterprise technology space. He is Head of Technical Media Strategy at salesforce.com and a TechCrunch contributing editor. Gillmor previously worked with leading musical artists including Paul Butterfield, David Sanborn, and members of The Band after an early career as a record producer and filmmaker with Columbia Records’ Firesign Theatre. As personal computers emerged in video and music production tools, Gillmor started contributing to various publications, most notably Byte Magazine,...
Kevin Marks is a software engineer. Kevin served as an evangelist for OpenSocial and as a software engineer at Google. In June 2009 he announced his resignation. From September 2003 to January 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 17 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati,...
Dan Farber was named Editor-in-Chief of CBSNews.com in Dec. 2008. Prior to CBS News he was Editor-in-Chief of CNET’s News.com in February 2008. Previously he was vice-president of editorial at CNET Networks and editor in chief of ZDNet. Dan has more than 25 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. He joined ZDNet in 1996, and led the development of ZDNet’s worldwide network of more than 70 technology-focused sites. Prior to joining ZDNet, Dan served...
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