While I agree fundamentally with your premise, I would have to point out that MS Access was always software-as-a-service for developers. Ultimately, while it wa

While I agree fundamentally with your premise, I would have to point out that MS Access was always software-as-a-service for developers. Ultimately, while it was accessible, the idea was to give powerful tools to developers to refine an interface/toolset for users. SalesForce, on the other hand, seems to be more a platform-as-a-service targeted at the user with aspects such as SOQL instead feeling like a bolt-on to give developers access to the data. So while they fill the same business case, they approach it from a completely opposite perspective. (Source: software engineer that had to work with SalesForce and other CRM tools extensively while working with data engineers; and that has worked with pre-dotNet ASP + MS Access)