I was thinking about the previous post, specifically about the Salesforce.com IdeaExchange community…
In the client/server world new releases are a big deal and can be very compelling…but do you know of anyone who is rabid with anticipation over the next release of Microsoft Office? Of course not. When you need to lay out that kind of money on an upgrade, you want to take a slower approach which analyzes the performance of the new software (is it buggy?) and you need to justify the cost of these new features to management (are 100 new fonts really worth the extra money?).
SFDC now has a dedicated community of users putting hours of effort into their suggestions, monitoring their performance on the exchange, voting, commenting, and competing with colleagues over whose idea is better. Users are jumping into new releases and updates with a gusto you don’t normally see outside of video game addicts or Apple fanboys.
Isn’t it cool that people can get this excited about their job and the tools they use in it? And what a great marketing touchstone to get people talking.
