It’s difficult when you work for a Services organisation to find appropriate inflection points to blog. Many of my day to day experiences involve customers throughout Asia Pacific region – many of whom (quite rightly) value their privacy and nature of our confidential relationship.
This topic is a little different as it speaks more broadly of our role as responsible players in the marketplace.
Firstly… I’d recommend you take a few minutes to read this post (and it’s accompanying comments): http://forcemonkey.blogspot.com/2010/12/why-hate-for-salesforcecom-crm.html
One positive aspect, yet often unknown, aspect of Microsoft is its deep respect of its competitors. Unfortunately this respect is often overshadowed by the over caffeinated activities of Microsoft’s marketing teams. At Microsoft we went out of our way to respect, understand and praise competitors – especially in front of customers. Instead of thinking about competitors as ‘evil’ or ‘danger’ we built a mature understanding of their circumstances. Doing so enabled us to emulate their success, avoid their failures and move into new markets.
Salesforce is a competitor of mine and I have deep genuine respect for their company and their products. At times they do get a little carried away with their ‘Oracle bashing’ and ‘Microsoft bashing’ – but beyond their marketeers and larger than life CEO you will find a group of people deeply committed to customer scenarios. For every piece of ‘jest’ there is x10 as much legitimate vision. It is this commitment to scenarios which binds us together as an industry. It is what separates professionals committed to helping customers from those simply wishing to ‘yell the loudest’ about quasi-religious allegiances.
On Microsoft’s front there has been a lot of negative ‘campaigning’ and this is unfortunate. Microsoft does have a good story to tell about CRM 2011 and it s a story which doesn’t require 1:1 comparisons with SFDC. There are fundamental differences in each offering and both have distinct strengths and weaknesses. Now it is no secret that my preference is MSCRM and I genuinely believe that it presents better value in most circumstances than SFDC. This doesn’t mean that SFDC customers have made a grave error: they made the best decision at the time with the information available.
Ultimately we must compete with each other. Let’s try and compete on features, price, experience and vision. Let’s understand that each of our offerings are different and sometimes complementary.
