Although I wasn’t able to get to DreamForce last month to see Salesforce.com unveil Chatter, its new social computing and collaboration add-on, I was able to watch Marc Benioff present his company’s wares three weeks later at CloudForce in London. An important thought struck me when I saw the slide setting out the pricing for Chatter. It’s free with a full Salesforce.com license, of course. For those users who don’t need the full Salesforce product, there’s a lower-cost license that bundles Chatter, Content and the Force.com platform-as-a-service. The question that instantly flitted into my mind was this: does that mean Force.com comes free with Chatter, or is it Chatter that’s free with Force.com?
The question’s important because, when Force.com was launched two years ago, this was supposed to be the strategy that finally allowed Salesforce.com to move out of its CRM silo into all those other pockets of enterprise endeavor where it couldn’t sell salesforce automation or customer service applications. Customers and partners would be able to build applications for HR, finance and all kinds of other back-office functions, ensuring that Force.com became the unifying cloud platform across the entire enterprise…
