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This is actually about 3 years old. I PM'd this product at salesforce.com, for which Dell was the first external customer. We initially designed it for salesfor

This is actually about 3 years old. I PM'd this product at salesforce.com, for which Dell was the first external customer. We initially designed it for salesforce.com's own community. The product is now known as Salesforce Ideas. I'm no longer at salesforce.com, so this is not a shill :) Many good things came out of this community. Dell started selling Linux pre-installed on their laptops for instance, that was an early win. You can see what they are doing at http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/b/direct2dell/archive/tags/Ideas+In+Action/default.aspx http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/b/direct2dell/archiv...

richardun 16y ago
Yeah, it was done around May, 2007. It was originally Crispy News. I worked with Norimasa Yoshida to get it set up for Dell, and in the process to Salesforce. I agree, I think it was definitely a win for the Linux community at least.
kingsley_20 16y ago
I designed this product to solve some of my own frustrations as a product manager, so here're some of my thoughts: Apart from the huge PR value (Dell, salesforce.com, Starbucks & whitehouse.gov all got a LOT of press from these) that communities like these bring the company, they are very good at some things that traditional roadmap planning processes suck at: 1. De-duplication: When communities coalesce around similar popular ideas, it's easy to understand patterns of requirements. Traditional request processes are black holes for this reason. 2. More Democratic Prioritization: Since there isn't a good way for smaller customers to coalesce, PMs are often stuck implementing requests from their largest customers. This solves that problem. 3. Partner promotion: As a platform provider, you want to be able to support complementary partners. Unfortunately, partners often don't know what to build, or have poorly targeted products. If you were building in the force.com ecosystem, you could start your customer development right in the salesforce.com community. This was important to me because I had a lot of friends in the partner/developer community and wanted them to succeed.

richardun 16y ago

Yeah, it was done around May, 2007. It was originally Crispy News. I worked with Norimasa Yoshida to get it set up for Dell, and in the process to Salesforce. I agree, I think it was definitely a win for the Linux community at least.

kingsley_20 16y ago

I designed this product to solve some of my own frustrations as a product manager, so here're some of my thoughts: Apart from the huge PR value (Dell, salesforce.com, Starbucks & whitehouse.gov all got a LOT of press from these) that communities like these bring the company, they are very good at some things that traditional roadmap planning processes suck at: 1. De-duplication: When communities coalesce around similar popular ideas, it's easy to understand patterns of requirements. Traditional request processes are black holes for this reason. 2. More Democratic Prioritization: Since there isn't a good way for smaller customers to coalesce, PMs are often stuck implementing requests from their largest customers. This solves that problem. 3. Partner promotion: As a platform provider, you want to be able to support complementary partners. Unfortunately, partners often don't know what to build, or have poorly targeted products. If you were building in the force.com ecosystem, you could start your customer development right in the salesforce.com community. This was important to me because I had a lot of friends in the partner/developer community and wanted them to succeed.